This was such a hard photo to do. It was shot through a window, so it had some reflections in it. The sky was dull, but HDR helped. However during the processing it hit me, what exactly am I trying to say? Dramatic skies over a building site says…? It made me think about HDR’ing everything. I usually do it to make an image more powerful and dramatic. In this case I had to do it because the images felt dull due to a grey sky. The end result was possibly a bit too dramatic for what is essentially just a building site. Should I just label it “Fine Art”, whack a title on and try to drive people towards a concept that makes the image appear to work? Honestly, I don’t know. So here’s the image and if you like it, great. Oh and the sky is a bit noisy and I think you can even see sensor dust or just dirt on the window. I probably should have removed that, or I could say that its relative to the chaos of the building site.
Liverpool – A work in progress
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The end result is, well, not bad. Your picture has a nice compo that really lets the viewer explore the whole image. The colors resulting from the processing add to the ‘construction site’-feeling (orange, brown, dust color etc…). Maybe the sky is a bit exaggerated… It is kinda hard to know when to stop with HDR. On the one hand, it gives some amazing effects, that can be very beautiful, on the other hand, the end result almost always looks the same : saturated colors and unnatural light. Both of them look great, but after I while, people get bored by them. 1 picture like that is fine, 2, 3, heck, maybe 10, but after that… nah, just make good pictures with a nice compo and keep the colors as real as possible. But hey, that only my personal opinion !
Pete, I think I understand what you are thinking. I’ve thought the same about my stuff also. Aesthetically pleasing, technically good but not too meaningful stuff is becomming a bit of a commodity these days. Good exposure, focus, processing and composition etc are all pretty easy for lots of people now. I feel it’s a bit ‘click, nice, click, nice, nice, next, next’ sort of experience. On the other hand, some people have figured out how to restore interest. There are often great series and features in filemagazine.com, I think.