Giant Tires

Giant Tires, Hawthorne, NJ
iPhone 4S, 1/580s @ f/2.4, ISO 50

As I drove past Giant Tire Service on Wagraw Road in Hawthorne, I saw these enormous tires stacked along the road, and couldn’t resist turning around to stop...

Giant tires (see building in the background for scale).

I took several shots, envisioning them as potential black and whites. In my home studio, I converted the featured photo to black and white in Adobe Camera Raw, using the color information to darken the sky and add contrast. The top half was a little hazy, but correcting it meant obscuring the nice shadow detail at the bottom. So, I adjusted for the bottom first, and opened the image in Photoshop. Then, reopened the original in Camera Raw, and adjusted for the top, opening it up in Photoshop. I layered the two images with a gradient mask to dodge the correction at the bottom of the top layer. This is the result.