The highlight of the San Francisco Cable Car Museum is the wheels that power the cable cars. These have a somewhat Victorian steam punk look, despite the fact that they are actually powered by General Electric diesel engines. The constantly turning wheels pass through underground tunnels to power San Francisco’s famous cable cars.

I think the cable car wheels look good in black and white; however, in many ways this Victorian steam punk industrial environment is also a great subject for HDR.

To create the HDR image shown, I used a wide-angle lens (12mm) with my camera mounted on a tripod. I shot seven exposures, each exposure at f/9 and ISO 200. Shutter speeds ranged from 1/13 of a second to ten seconds.

I combined these manually bracketed images in post-production to create a single HDR image using tools provided by Nik Software, as well as hand-HDR layering Photoshop. The biggest single challenge was to retouch out a man in a red shirt, who appeared as a “ghost”—he was partially rendered—in two of the frames.