Travel Theme: Architecture

If you are ever in St. Paul Minnesota, stop by the state capitol and take the tour. Don’t forget your camera because, weather permitting, the tour goes out on the roof:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/8 1/125

The view of St. Paul is wonderful and you can take a photo of this gold leaf statue that is on the roof of the building.

When I was on the roof, I was pretty sure that I was going to want to do an HDR version of this image.  So, I bracketed my exposures.  So the image above is a combination of three images, set to (-1, 0, 1)  I did this because it was an overcast but bright day, so I was pretty sure that just a single image would be pretty washed out.  I’ll put the original image in at the bottom of the post so that you will see what I mean.  I used Photomatix to create the HDR, but what I really wanted was an image that looked like what you would actually see, so I stayed away from the color manipulation that is possible in photo editing.  I then sharpened the image in Photoshop and cropped it just a bit.  Here is the original image:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/8 1/125

In this case, I think the HDR gave the image the subtle boost I was looking for.  What do you think?

This post was written in response to the weekly travel theme challenge at Where’s my backpack?; architecture is the topic for this week.

Cheers!