Iowa Capitol

The Barbarian

kdog

Welcome to the forum, The Barbarian.

This is a really nice composition. You really nailed the symmetry and perspective on this which I'm certain was no small matter. A very interesting and beautiful subject, and that sky really tops it off. Well done!

Cheers,
-joel

The Barbarian

Thanks for your kind words. It was a bit of a challenge, looking up, to get all the lines straight and square.

JC

Nice exposure on the building, i like the gleam on the dome. You've got a persistent fringe around the building though, with color artifacts. The pixelation between the sky and the building/fringe doesn't match either. What kind of post-processing did you do?

The Barbarian

Tone mapping, perspective adjust, color balance. Don't remember all of it. The dome is gold leaf, BTW.

JC

The Barbarian wrote: »

Tone mapping, perspective adjust, color balance. Don't remember all of it. The dome is gold leaf, BTW.

Hmmm. It looks a little fake to me, like the sky doesn't quite fit with the building. The noise distribution in the sky is totally different from the noise distribution on the building. I'm wondering if that's a result of a) jpg compression, b) the tonemapping or c) something else. Was this a single image, or exposure bracketed?

marionet

Wow, I've never been to Iowa but wouldn't have guessed this was there. My personal opinion is you're more than halfway where this picture wants to be; compared to that dynamic vibrant-looking sky, the building looks a bit like cardboard except for the dome. I think if you can do a careful selection of the building and pop it up some, you'll have a really really nice image.

The Barbarian

It is an HDR. Five exposures, I think. BTW, the sky does look overdramatic, which is why I took the shot. If you're wondering if I used layers to put the capitol over a sky, check out the tree branches at the lower right. If there's a way to do that with layers, I don't know how to do it.

I took a look at a very enlarged view of the right dome, and the pixels of the sky and the building are the same size and seem to match up. There's a bit of chromatic aberration; the left side has a fringe of magenta. But I don't see anything else.

I just don't know.

The Barbarian

My personal opinion is you're more than halfway where this picture wants to be; compared to that dynamic vibrant-looking sky, the building looks a bit like cardboard except for the dome. I think if you can do a careful selection of the building and pop it up some, you'll have a really really nice image.

The building actually looks like that. It's a buff sandstone. Hadn't thought about it, but brilliant upstairs, and sort of ordinary everywhere else is a pretty good metaphor for Iowans.

kdog

The Barbarian wrote: »

Hadn't thought about it, but brilliant upstairs, and sort of ordinary everywhere else is a pretty good metaphor for Iowans.

Cornflake

There's an oddness to it but I like the oddness. I probably like HDR more than a lot of people do. It works for me.