This is the American Modernist Garden at Hamilton Gardens (in Hamilton, where else).

American Modernist Garden

American Modernist Garden

Hamilton Gardens is so out-of-character with the rest of Hamilton. The gardens are well laid out with a lot of class.  A very pleasant place to spend time. (Hamilton itself is none of these.)

The picture was taken on one of the busiest days of the year, 2nd January, and it took some waiting to find a gap between the people.

The picture is processed in a slightly different way. It used 3 RAW files which were processed in Photoshop using a technique to bring out the detail – it goes like this: duplicate a layer, Invert; blend mode Vivid Light. Apply surface blur. Copy results to a new layer, which is blended with Soft Light mode.

This was done for each of the 3 RAWs, to create 3 jpegs. These were then processed with Photomatix and tone-mapped to give a normal HDR.

Back into Photoshop for some more tweaking – Hue and Saturation/Colorize mixed with Soft Light. Followed by Selective Color adjustment.