Zoltar

Today's photo was taken inside the Buckhorn Museum & Saloon & Texas Ranger Museum in downtown San Antonio, Texas. Most readers will probably recall that a similar machine was an integral part of the movie "Big" that starred Tom Hanks. That is the first thing that I saw when I saw it, but what I did not know at the time is that the machine in the movie was actually a Zoltar machine as well! I did not feel like tempting fate, so rather than pay a dollar for Zoltar to speak and risk turning me into a child again, I chose instead to take some photos of Zoltar.

I did my best to minimize the reflection in the glass, which was pretty difficult because there are a lot of lights near the entrance to the Buckhorn. This past Sunday the San Antonio Express News ran an article about "cool bars to visit in San Antonio", so I decided to pay the Buckhorn a visit after enjoying lunch with my wife at Fogo de Chão. I took several shots inside of the Buckhorn (and of other places downtown during the excursion downtown) but this was by far my favorite of the day so I processed it first.

During processing, I improvised a new technique to process this photo that I am going to likely use in future shots. I could not get the sides of the shot to look exactly how I wanted using the normal double planar tool in Bokeh 2, so I processed each side separately, then combined the results. I also desaturated the color from the sides of the shot to make Zoltar stand out a bit more. I was hoping to achieve a supernatural/eerie/creepy/mystical look in this shot, and I think the extra time that I spent trying to get the shot exactly how I envisioned it when setting up the tripod and camera to capture this scene was totally worth it.

Zoltar

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