Damien Katz

This is a real store on Old Statesville road near our house in Charlotte NC. I used our Sony Cyber-shot DSC-N2 with its built-in exposure burst mode and the trial version of Photomatix Pro (you can see the trialware watermarks) to merge the multiple exposures into an HDR image.

The sky looks washed out to me (but maybe that's what it really looks like in NC?). I haven't tried this myself, but you can use the free Paint.NET to do HDR (http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=5570). The manual approach may let you fine-tune the results a little better.

Yeah, the whole thing seems smokey. I don't know why, I literally put the picture through with zero camera and software adjustments. But still I thought the effect was impressive, adding a surreal quality that's easy to achieve. Plus that store is wild stuff.

Nice store. Nothing says, "welcome, come buy our stuff" like a "Keep Out!" sign.