Lantarn in Central Warsaw
Close to the Cultural Palace and central station in Warsaw, capital of Poland. The view is captured at the end of 2008 at 16h30. It's pretty amazing but around that time of the year it's getting dark at 15h30. Way in too early in my opinion.
TECH-INFO: I wanted to capture the lantern and the buildings, so on a tripod I shot 9 JPGs with each a stop difference. Unfortunately this was not enough to capture the huge dynamic range of light. The darkest image still contained blown out areas of the lantern lamps while the brightest image was too dark to capture all the details of the buildings. This means that the background stays pretty dark. I was not so happy but after a while I started to like the result a lot. At least the lantern is pretty bright.
In Photomatrix I used the exposure blending function to merge all images. Afterwards I adjusted the result in Photoshop using masked curves and removed the lens flare except the part around the lantern. The latter was causing heavy flaring in my lens. Finally I did a slight crop.
People talk about flaring and ghosting, I was wondering again about the difference. Using google I found
this nice page demonstrating it using two images.
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Since I take multiple JPGs with different exposures I have enough exposure information, more than using one RAW file. For Nikon, all RAW converters except Capture NX and View NX, really mess up the colors, especially for portraits. I try to avoid RAW if I can. Also RAW files fill up my memory card very quickly when I'm shooting multiple exposures (every time 7 or 9 files) and they mostly don't give any benefit when using them for making HDR files. Besides that , the make the processing time longer.
I do (like to) use RAW when I don't shoot portraits, need as much possible data for post processing and I can't shoot multiple exposures. In all other cases it's mostly JPG.