LightningPaul

In Barcelona near the Casino. I really like this building: nicely modern surrounded by a a cool white frame.


TECH-INFO: 5 JPGs shot hand held, used to make a HDR image. DxO Optics Pro for lens corrections, Photoshop for merging and aligning into a HDR file. Also I made the lines of the vertical buildings parallel using the skew method of free transform function. It gives the same effect as a tilt lens.
Initially I tried to tone map it in Photomatrix but unfortunately I got all the time very ugly halos around the building. Instead I used a nice free tool called Picturenaut (actually it's donation-ware). It does real time tone mapping using my 8 CPU cores in parallel, really amazing to see. For tone mapping tThe adaptive logarithmic method gave the best result. Afterwards, I adjusted the colors and contrast in Photoshop to get a better looking sky and building.

I made a mistake during photographing. The aperture was set on f/8.0 and I focused on the lamp, which was two meter in front of me. The resulting DOF is too low, look at the top of the building which is not sharp (the skewing in Photoshop to straighten lines made it even worse). Much better would probably be f/16. Also focusing at 1/3 between the lamp and building would improved sharpness even more. Anyway, as long I'm learning I'll be happy.