New Year’s Eve of 2011 was cold and rainy in Burlington, Vermont. Their First Night celebrations were taking place all across the city. Walking through the unpleasant weather wasn’t the most comfortable experience so the appearance of a small bar on the path between venues was a welcome sight and served as a place in which to take cover for a few minutes and brace for the rest of the evening with a beer.
The place was clearly not a tourist destination and some obvious locals were filling a few of the spots along the bar.
Deeper into the bar, neon signs, video games, a pool table, and an American flag graced their presently ignored back room.
The sight screamed for the need to be photographed!
On that night in 2011, my gear included a Pentax K-5, fastened to a SMC Pentax-DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL [IF] lens. I adjusted my settings and captured three, 2-stop exposure-bracketed RAW images at ISO 1250. It was one of those moments which every photographer has periodically when you simply can’t wait to extract the images from the camera to see what you were able to capture.
However, the HDR and image processing tools available in 2011 were at the early stages of development. Combining the images and generating a final photograph was no easy task. So when I was finally able to work with the photographs several days later, I can recall spending several hours fussing with software and settings before I finally found a look that fit that specific moment in the bar. The final image turned out to be one of my absolute favorites.
Today, 12 years later, I’m in the process of assuring my sizable Adobe Lightroom library is backed up to all the proper places and I happened to rediscover this final image and its original RAW files. I just had to see what today’s tools would do with yesterday’s images!
I pushed the original RAW files through the DxO PureRAW 3 application to create new versions of these images. PureRAW cleaned up the noise, compensated for lens distortions, and enhanced their sharpness and detail. Those new images were then combined into a final image using Adobe Lightroom Classic’s built-in HDR photo merge function. That function does a much better job of compensating for shifting content across multiple, merged exposures than the software of 2011.
The total time for all of this work was no more than 10 minutes.
From there, I made a few very modest adjustments to the image exposure. And because I was feeling nostalgic, I added a frame to the photo, just as I used to frame all of my photos, using Adobe Photoshop.
This new creation is pretty impressive and also goes into my list of my most favored images. For me, the original image has grit and character that match the feel of the bar and the new image has a better display of reality, conveying the actual look of that moment as I recall it to have been.
But I love them both and they do an equal job of bringing the memories of that moment to light. I hope that you enjoy them too.
Both images are added below so that you can click on them for a full-screen view, quickly switch between them, and compare their differences!
