Me and a friend managed to get into the hidden, abandoned train tunnel under the Glasgow Botanical Gardens. Extremely fascinating (and not a little creepy!) but also very dark. Armed with a tripod and torches, we went in.

My friend wanted a picture of himself exploring the tunnel, so I locked off the tripod and set my camera up for a 15 second exposure, then did a bit of light painting. Here was the result...

REALLY?!?! 15 seconds AND some blasts with the speedlight? As this was a luchtime expedition, time was a factor, so back to the office we went. Going through the pictures later that evening, the above was obviously a throwaway. That was, until, I got creative with the RAW file. During the RAW conversion, I dropped the blacks to 0 and put the exposure up +3. Another couple of tweaks gave me the following shot.

Bingo! Our subject is a little soft due to him standing still for 15 seconds, however the rest of the image came through beautifully. Something which would never have happened if I never shot RAW. Lesson learned!

Please note, you cannot make such changes on something like a portrait. The artifacts would be too obvious. This is an image of a tunnel which is already grimey and noisy, so my technique worked.

For the rest of the images, click here.