Regular readers know that I enjoy both HDR and black and white photography. So when our hosts at our recent Hill Country Photo Safari, Sharron and Larry Jay of BCNA, rolled out their fully restored antique chuckwagon I couldn’t resist combining them. To enhance the overall effect rather than use sunlight we lit the wagon with flashlights. Everyone had a lot of fun and got some great shots, but capturing the raw images only started my fun.

The first image I worked on was a straightforward one taken as a 30 second exposure while Larry and I were painting the wagon with our lights. I put a general “wash” on the wagon with a daylight balanced LED flashlight while he painted the features with a warmer light. The result was a simple rendering of the wagon against the night background:

But the great thing about painting with light is that we can experiment with different effects. For the next shot we added an SB-900 behind the wagon set to 1/4 power. The wagon suddenly turned a lot more three dimensional and more interesting:

Now the wagon looked good, but we were missing any hint of the beautiful blue twilight sky and trailing clouds that had been there when we first rolled the wagon out before dark. Fortunately I had taken a couple frames at that time and had left my camera and tripod in exactly the same place as it got dark.

So I simply took the very first images I captured—where the twilight still held sway in the sky—and combined them with our later images where we painted with flashlights and even backlit with an SB-900, using PhotoMatix Pro to create an image depicting both the colorful detail of the wagon and the blue of the sky:

I liked where the image was going but the Jay’s restoration was so good that the wagon really looked almost new. I wanted to show it as an artifact of the cowboy’s life in the old west of South Texas. So I further processed the image using SilverEfex Pro into a monotone. Starting with their antique preset gave me a big leg up. From there it was a simple matter of tweaking to make the dark tree look like a fog or mist and the wagon look old and dreamy. The addition of a “ripped edge” made the image look like something that you might have found printed a century ago.

Whether you like the “straight” print, the backlit version or the antique one they all represent valid and alternative versions of the photographic truth about this gorgeous antique chuck wagon. Of course none of the renderings will help you taste the wonderful brisket that Sharron cooked up for us that night. But the chuckwagon is sure to become a regular on our Texas Hill Country photo safaris!--David