Status-Q

I was quite pleased with this shot, taken by the Marathon Petroleum plant in Dearborn, Michigan last night.

(You can click it for a larger version, which looks much better)

This was handheld – I wish I’d had a tripod, but at this point the security guards pulled up and asked us to move on…

Part of what makes it ‘pretty’ is the use of two different types of lighting – given the industrial location, I imagine the golden light is sodium and the silver is halogen – and the camera’s auto white-balance did a good job of reproducing what I saw.

But when I got home and loaded it into Lightroom, I thought it would be fun to try calibrating the white balance based on a chimney lit by the sodium light. (I could have achieved a similar effect by selecting tungsten white balance in the camera.) The result was also pretty. Can’t quite decide which I prefer…