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!
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