I thought about calling this HDR image “Beauty and The Beasts” but decided to focus on the beauty instead.  Those fantastic beasts at the National Capital Trolley Museum are still wonderful to photograph though.

This is what I would call an Environment Portrait of the 955 Trolley inside “Street Car Hall” at the museum. On the day I visited, there were quite a few beauties and beasts available to investigate.

Processing: Seven images were loaded into Nik HDR Efex Pro where I did quite a bit of tone mapping to get just the right amount of depth and tonal balance. I used 12 Control Points to make highlight and shadow adjustments and added Structure for more detail. The final image was then loaded to Adobe Photoshop where I did Exposure, Hue/Saturation, Curves and High Pass filter adjustments.

Just for fun, I cropped this image for a pano effect and loaded it into Nik Silver Efex Pro 2. After playing around with the presets, I came up with this black and white version.

Equipment used: Nikon D700 with 28-70mm 2.8 set at f/11, ISO 1600.Manfrotto 190XPROB with 486RC2 ball head.