Shelby, North Carolina is a neat little town about 30 miles from where I live. Typically when I drive through Shelby I am on my way to western NC and really haven't spent much time in the area. Last week I found myself in the downtown Shelby area where I noticed this cafe - along with a few other structures - that I thought would make nice documentary photographs. So on Saturday I revisited the site and was blessed with a gorgeous color-filled, partially cloudy sky, glowing neon signs, and a nicely-lit interior. I was very excited to have captured such a colorful scene! But that excitement was squashed about 10 minutes into processing my raw files where I found myself battling a horrific array of various color temps. I knew that was going to be an issue ahead of time but in the past I've been able to selectively process different areas of different color temps to find a suitable common ground for a global balance. Not true here! But thankfully the colorful array lent itself well to a black and white conversion that I am very pleased with!
Image is tone-blended from 9 exposures captured at +/- 1.0EV ranging from 1/1000-second to 1/4-second.