LightningPaul

This is shot during my visit in Den Haag (in English called The Hague), in Holland. The buildings were looking very cool. Especially with the sun.


TECH-INFO: shooting into the sun is mostly the ideal recipe for bad pictures, unless you want to make a silhouette or shoot enough exposures (nine in my case) to merge them into a HDR file. Of course, I did the latter. After lens corrections, in DxO Optics Pro, of the shot pictures I used Photoshop to auto-align and merge them. Mainly because they were shot hand held. To be able to show you the image, tone mapping must be done first. When having very high contrasts, it's pretty difficult to do that when you want to have a more natural looking result. For the fans of very artistic images, a huge dynamic range is an excellent ingredient to achieve such art works which you often see on many sites.
Normally I use Photomatrix but my result was too flashy. So I used the freeware (actually donation-ware) program Picturenaut to create a second tone mapping, using the photoreceptor algorithm. The result was looking very natural but missing too much detail, especially in the clouds. So I took both tone mapped images to blend them together in Photoshop. Besides that I used a few masked adjustment layers to finish everything.