The first one is the most straightforward shot. 6 closely bracketed shots... well a set of three at -2, 0, +2 and another set biased a 1/2 stop darker and then again shot at -2, 0, +2 and all bunged together in Photomatix. Slight levels/brightness/contrast/unsharp mask bumping, and correction of perspective and here ya go:
I can't even begin to remember everything I did to this, the B&W conversion was done in Photomatix, multiple layers of light gaussian blur masked to fix a few things, strong vignette, leveling perspective correction....
These are a bit more straight ouf of Photomatix, with less correction, not sure if I like these better then the first, may need to play more with these bad boys!
Which do you like more?