Boston at night

[DanK]

For those of you who know the city, this is from the Custom House tower, a few blocks from the waterfront. Although I almost always use exposure fusion rather than HDR, in this case, I merged 3 images in lightroom using its HDR merge. Best in the lytebox to get a dark background. Other details, since Smugmug strips exif: 24mm, ISO 200, f/8.0, exposures of 1.3, 5, and 20 seconds.

C&C welcome, as always.

[rpcrowe]

Really nice image!

[Ndukes]

Brilliant Dan. 'The Light Fantastic!'

[IzzieK]

Excellent image, Dan! I love it. One question: from where did you take this shot?

[Shadowman]

Nicely done.

[Rebel]

Stunning image, love it!

[John 2]

Good comp of a difficult subject and the sort of image I enjoy looking at. I can't help wondering what is going on behind all those illuminated windows.

[DanK]

Thanks, all. Izzie, the Customs House tower I mentioned is now a Marriott. For a small fee, they let people go up to an observation deck for a few hours around sunset. It's right by the waterfront. That's Rowe's Wharf top left, and more or less directly behind me and a few blocks in is Fanueil Hall.

John, 90 degrees from this shot were some interesting buildings much closer to the tower. I took a number of shots of them but discovered when I put the photos on the computer that one of them must be condominiums rather than offices, and I was photographing directly into people's apartments. Oops.

[Manfred M]

Dan - definitely a very nice, interesting shot taken from a wonderful vantage point. I've only been to Boston once (not counting the time I made a connection at Logan), so I have a good general idea as to where you took this from.

The only thing that I wonder about is whether fixing the perspective might strengthen this image. It might just be the techie in me coming through, but I find I like it when the sides of buildings are vertical.

[compasiune11]

Great image. I like the light, how it flows.... superb!

[rpcrowe]

I can appreciate where Manfred is coming from regarding perspective. I "usually" am the guy shouting "fix the perspective". However, in this case, I think that the converging lines tend to draw my eye into the image...

[DanK]

I'm also generally of the 'fix the perspective' school, but I tried doing so with this image last night, and it doesn't work well, for several reasons. Given the nature of this image, fixing the verticals actually introduces other distortions, and it leaves the image without much of a center. So, I left it as is.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Dan,

It is a very colourful shot, kinda fairytail, oops, I mean fairytale

I don't have a problem with the perspective and usually I'm another member that would be 'in line' to suggest it.

I do have an issue with depth perception, the ground looks very 'flat' (two dimensional), especially the paved and lawned ribbon threading through the middle. I'm not sure what the answer is, if mine, I'd try some Local Contrast Enhancement applied just to the appropriate areas of the image to see if that helped.

There's another thing I am usually first in line to suggest be fixed and that's lateral CA (Chromatic Aberration) - and I think I detect some here, so not sure whether it is real uncorrected lens issue, or if it is an artefact of the merging process. I also accept there are some places where edge illumination of structures may give something that looks like CA, but isn't.

However, the more I look (very closely), the more convinced I become that it is CA; it is opposite sense on opposite sides of the image and worse in corners (e.g. lower right). Having played about with the CA corrections in ACR recently, I have become even more attuned to spotting it and also realise that my usual reliance on having the 'Fix CA' checkbox active isn't always sufficient to fix it everywhere in an image and sometimes it needs some significant manipulation of the manual controls to get all of it, but also that being heavy handed with them can seriously mess with legitimate small coloured edges in a picture (and you have a lot of them here). At this point, knowing your skills, I should probably 'stop digging' (myself into this hole), but I'll end by saying that perhaps you have 'been round this iteration loop' and what we see here is the best compromise.

In extreme cases, I have been known to manual go in with the 'Desaturate' (100%) sponge tool and wipe away false colour edges when all else fails (at high magnification).

Cheers, Dave

[DanK]

Dave,

I appreciate the suggestions. The image I posted was a quick edit, and your comments will get me to go back and be more careful. I will have to check to see whether what you are seeing is CA or an artifact of the merge, but I wouldn't doubt the former. You are a Nikon shooter, so you would have no reason to follow this stuff, but the lens I used, Canon's 24-105, is optically toward the low end of the L lens line-up. I use it because I find the extra length--the competitors are 24-70mm--extremely useful. So, it's altogether possible that there are some visible distortions. I'll check both the composite and one of the original images to figure this out.

Re depth: I wonder if that is because the foreground is dark, and the visual center, which is very bright, is fairly far back.

Dan