Sunday, November 28, 2010, 09:47 PM - Photo recipes
To create this, it is relatively easy once you found a suitable area to photograph. You need some big straight lines, and preferably some repetitive square patterns, like from windows, tiles,...I used the inner structure of the Arche de la Défense, near Paris:

Shooting vertically inside this building provides a nice nearly symmetric pattern, with the roof tiles creating a background pattern:

(this one is shot with a fisheye (17mm), thus the distortion)
Find a good position:

I used my old 21mm Soligor lens, which has the advantage of featuring a nearly non-existent distortion.
Now, let's start the tricks...I placed a graduated sunset filter over the lens, in order to provide an orange gradation. This is a Cokin square filter (inside a P-size holder), which is quite easy to position over the big front element of this lens.

A graduated orange color might seems to be a strange idea, but once you turn the picture into negative, it starts to be quite neat:

White areas turned into black, and orange turned into blue (its complementary color). The pattern from the roof tiles now seems to glow in blue over black.
Tweak curves a bit in order to darken the "wings":

Reduce saturation in order to tune down the blue glow:

Add a final small tweak to curves, and clone out a big dust bunny over the front lens (which happens often when shooting vertically for a long time):

Now just add some borders, and here we are, a blueprint-like done from a real picture, with only minimal post-processing:

(picture from my 2009 pic a day gallery)
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