Interesting Building

[mtngal]

I took some pictures recently of an interesting modern building. Here are some pictures I took of it - pictures were taken at noon, so the sun was very bright and high in the sky. That made taking these looking up pictures difficult.



The building is built in a square and has catwalks between the various wings and levels. Trying to capture it all, even with a 12 mm lens, is difficult.



And I got dizzy just looking at these pictures. I thought about trying to correct the perspective created by using such a wide lens and then decided I would end up cutting off too much of the building in some of them, and it was impossible in others.

What makes this building interesting, besides the dizzying catwalks, is it's location. The building was built around and over an existing 30 year old parking structure:



These were created using 5 exposures, 1.7 stops between each frame and merged using Photomatix, with other changes in CS4 and sharpening using Topaz Lab's Detail plug-in.

[Ordo]

That first pick is stunning. Weird architecture.

[mtngal]

Thanks - the architecture might be weird, but it's practical. Who wants to walk 2 sides of a triangle and wait for an elevator when they can walk across the hypotenuse (at least in good weather, which SoCal has mostly)? And since land is such a premium at this location, it makes sense to make use of the space above the parking structure. The area is very dense when it comes to buildings.

[bahadir]

Wow! Great place for the practice of arranging diagonals in composition I also saw Hard's B&W interpretation on the last one and liked it.
So, 5 exposures, 1.7 stops...Good decision indeed, when the scene offers a pretty wide tonal range. Hey, I'm not going to ask if these images are what you really saw Now who says hdr ends in artificial looks as long as you have a good eye and good control over your camera and the required softwares?! (a rhetorical question requiring no answer )

[mtngal]

I played around with b&w conversions, they work really well. I did one with a single exposure but it was a lot of work and I had to run it through a noise reduction program - even though I chose the middle exposure which had the sky more or less blown out, I still had to lighten the catwalks and got more noise than I wanted. It was much easier to use the HDR versions. I tried a couple of the others, but couldn't get an exposure without some of the building blown out that still had enough information in the darks to lighten. The first one, especially, didn't work - anything but the darkest exposure blew out the detail in the upper left railing and it looked very strange. I just haven't uploaded them yet, so I thought I'd see what people thought with the color versions first.

[Alasdair]

Your first and second pictures were stunning. I'm still looking for the key's on my keyboard . They are different than what we usually see of architecture, but I like them, not just because they make me dizzy, but also because they are different and shot very well.

[NMRecording]

lovely shots. The 'dizzying' ones remind me of the painting with various stairways and dimensions all intertwining. The artist name is drawing a blank, google here i come.

[Walter_S]

Now, these motives are truly ment to be HDR'ed - No doubt about it! And you pulled it off beautifully, mtngal. Great HDR's and I look and look and find interesting new bits all the time. In fact, this is the reason I like # 3 best. All those different tonalities - not to speak of all those crazy walkways and levels...

Great series!

[mtngal]

There is no way one picture can capture the dynamic range I wanted to capture here. When I decided to convert them to b&w I tried using the middle exposure because it wouldn't matter if the sky was blown out. Unfortunately there were parts of the building that were also blown out and the first frame I had that had all the highlights clipped too much in the blacks and I couldn't bring the detail out without introducing a lot of noise. One worked, but I had to run it through a noise reduction program before doing the conversion. After that I just used the HDR versions for converting to b&w. They came out very nicely, too.

NMRecording - I know who you mean, but names always escape me. He does drawings that have optical illusions.

[Bynx]

The illustionist is M.C. Escher.