Kevin Schaffer Photography: Classical Gas Museum

These shots were taken in February 2013, at the Classical Gas Museum in Embudo, located along the Rio Grande River about 43 miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I happened upon this place, noticing it as I drove by. A quick u-turn and I was soon inside, checking things out and asking a few questions. I also took a few photos, which also happened to be one of the first times that I had used my wide angle lens. After I got back home to Alaska (having not yet made the decision to move to Santa Fe) I was pleased with some of the photos from that day, and basically set them aside.

I recently decided to reprocess some photos from that day using techniques I've been experimenting with and refining over the past several months. I chose to do this because I thought that the original images were a little "flat" compared to what I actually saw when I was there. First I tweaked things a bit in Adobe Lightroom 5, mainly concentrating on bringing out details in the shadows, then I further processed them using the Color Efex Pro 4 Lightroom plug-in (with the Tonal Contrast preset to make the colors "pop") and Dfine 2 Lightroom plug-in (to reduce the noise some since I took these shots hand held in a low lit room), both of which are from the Google Nik Collection, then I did some basic sharpening back in Lightroom before finally exporting the final images.

This first shot - obviously - is a wide shot of the main room...