Dramatic Capitol Building

[chikubang]

IT fair is seriously packed with sardines so I decided to walk along City hall..
This picture was edited using HDR. But the problem is, the saturation seems to be off and the picture turns out rather noisy. Please give comments on below pictures and how can i improve using HDR. Thanks.

[chikubang]

No commments again? Please give more comments as in how to improve this pic. THNAKS A MILLION FOR YR HELP.

[iluvspinach]

i like the details of the foreground and background..but it's too underexposed for me.

[chikubang]

yar.. i find it underexposed...but when i tried to change the exposure, the pic became weird....

[chikubang]

other than underexpose, anything else..? Is there any thing wrong with the composition?

[night86mare]

first off, while composition is important, technical soundness must at least be there

1) from what i can see your clouds look unnatural, you need to improve your hdr program workflow
2) building is tilted, traffic light and signs do not add to picture and provide distraction from your point of focus/subject
3) same goes for the people

here - isolation with a closer up look would do you much better, keeping it simple is one of the ways to compose, and it almost always works so long as you don't do it too weirdly

[rexlim]

Composition wise, if I were u, I would go beside the traffic light, take the shot from floor level(make sure no car passing by, now u left out the traffic light post(distraction)). I would oso not include the two buildings by the side.
What I wanna say, the cloud was WOW!

[denniskee]

1) looks fake. with that kind of sky, the rest of the photo cant be this dark.
2) the 2 tall dark buildings is distracting.
3) the road sign and the traffic light is also distracting. (try stand infront of it to take a shot).
4) the passerby also distracting, especially the bag of the guy in green.

[chikubang]

thanks for those invaluable advise. First time using Photomatx, pics turn out fake. Agree...Thanks...Will try to crop and show u guys the final result.

[lastboltnut]

other than those mentioned, I would like to add that as the scene has really high DR (Dynamic Range), try the followings:

1. Since the object is a building, it doesn't move, try multiple shots to capture the DR data nicely and you wouldn't have problem of underexposed building with only nicely exposed sky.

2. If you want to take only a single RAW (with limited DR sensing range) for "HDR", then you should expose the pic at the mid range, that means sacrrfice a bit of the sky by overexposing the shot abit so that the details in the shadow can be better recovered during the tone mapping. Although it is said that digital shooting should expose more for highlight, but it didn't mean that the shadow can be overly forced to show details, if not noise in the shadow will be overwhelming.

Hope this opinion works for you.

[aeqmal]

Pic looks cropped, the building too underexposed whereas the sky n clouds are ok. The clouds makes the pic interesting but the people are distracting. Maybe next time must say.."x'cuse me, x'cuse me first..hehehe".

LOVE THE CLOUDS...

[nigel84]

argh, the tilt is bad....