for those of you who were wondering this was taken in central park new york. NO this is not an HDR image, played with layers, curves, levels and some sharpening.
thank you for the great comments, and for making this photo truely my best of 2006, hopefully i will be improving more in 2007.
cheers,
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This is a great shot which I think should have scored better. It might be worthwhile re-shooting this using a longer shutter speed to blur the water. The detail in the water is a little distracting. Since you're only shooting at f/6.3, you will be able to slow the shutter speed by stopping down some more. You will however still have to get hold of some fairly thick ND filters since this is in daylight.
I like how it seems the clouds are moving by at a steady pace and the reflection of the buildings in the water. With the sun and the buildings being on the left side of the photograph it kind of balances out with the clouds on the right side.
I really like your post processing on this one. I hope you enlighten us after the challenge is over. While some might think it over the top, it has an edgy surreal feeling I really like. A boat in the lower right corner to balance the shoreline/cityscape and clouds would have been cool too. ;) An 8 for me.
There are so many good entries here and it's hard to decide which one is really the best. The great thing about this photograph are the elements present: sparkling water with the reflections, dramatic cloudy skies, good buildings to enhance the sky line, green trees that add more colors.
HDR? I am not big fan but this isn't cartoonish so it works for me.
One request: I wish to see the water cropped just a little bit tight so that the lines for the trees and bldgs are on the 1/3 line of the photo.
Looks like you used HDR. Just learning how to use that myself. There is a distracting unnatural line element in the water reflections that maybe you could smooth out in PS.
Wow, very cinematic feel to this shot.
The only main thing i don't like about it though, is the heavier dodging used on the right hand side is visably much darker than the left.
Great shot though.
A visual treat. My only nitpick is the sky in the upper right corner seems too dark for the scene. It appears to go from bright (on the left) to dark too quickly.
Someone's been practicing the PS skillz. The only thing I saw that I don't like is the slightly exessive burn in the top right area of clouds and what appears to be bad edges in the middle right of the clouds with bright spots... There's a bit of smudgy grey directly to the right of the two towers as well. If its natural, no big deal, but it looks like you might have slightly overdone something in that area... On the other hand, there are some dingy tones in the clouds on the horizon on the left that I really like. Be careful with overdoing the processing on the sky, particularly when it is reflected in water...
Still quite impressive.
I also see some weird edging in the water... I wonder if this is not so much processing, but JPG artifacts. I had a quick look and your file size is 89K... that's pretty heavy compression for such a rich and large pic... I wonder if at 200k if these effects were to disappear completely...
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