Old Tyme Wheels

Thank to you and everyone else for the kind comments. Glad you enjoyed it. As I said below I did selectively lighten the smokebox door. I expose manually taking test shots aiming to have small areas of the white areas showing as over exposed (flashing black highlight alert on a Canon, probably similar available on other makes) and then I open the Raw file in Camera Raw via Adobe Bridge. This shows too bright areas in red and too dark areas in blue. You can use the "recovery" slider to get the too bright areas back into range by pushing to right and watching red areas shrink. The "blacks" slider can be moved to left to recover the dark areas. Once this done I open the image in CS5 and sometimes use a bit of highlights and shadows and then jiggle the contrast to stop it looking too HDR ish. In this case didn't need the highlights but did slect and lighten the smokebox.

Thank you. No there is no filter. I used to use a polarising filter when I took slides back 30 years ago but it takes the shine off the boiler of steam locomotives so they look awful. Then I used a graduated grey on negative roll film photos of steam but I find the skies are blue enough (well if there is blue showing) with no filter on the two Canon digital SLRs I've had. The main problem on this was balancing the black loco and the white steam, snow and clouds. I took on Raw, selectively lightened the front of the smoke box (in shadow apart from light reflected from snow.)