View from the Tundra (Minneapolis)

My favorite city, Chicago, from the top of the John Hancock building. This town is awesome. Sure there’s winter (I grew up in the midwest, so what do I care), but the bars / restaurants / Lake Michigan / people / etc make this place unbeatable. The 18 mile beach path down Lake Michigan is unreal. Whenever I think of Chicago, I always think of the mass (must be hundreds) of simultaneous volleyball games on the beach during the summer.

I’ve been up to the “Signature Room on the 95th Floor” many times to grab a drink at sunset or night. Not the cheapest drink in town, but it’s definitely worth it. One time, a guy at the table next to me proposed to his girlfriend right there (Sounds like a romantic idea, but the whole place was watching these guys, and they left within 5 minutes). I actually took this shot from the Observatory on the floor above.

Shooting Technique:

• Used mirror lock-up and remote shutter release to get maximum sharpness
• Shot at f/16 to get a little more sharpness while holding depth of field, and to minimize the starburst from bright lights
• Shot exposures at -2,-1,metered,1,2 to get a 5 shot HDR, and then shot this sequence 3 times. I wanted multiple shots for a few reasons: this increases the light trails from cars and I like that red streak, and the extra shots help to minimize noise in the sky (which is inevitably brought out by the HDR process)

Photoshop technique:

• Used noise reduction
• Merged to HDR and tonemapped
• Heavy use of healing brush on the sky to minimize areas where the dust on the exterior of the window was visible (you can’t see it in the builings or water, but you could see it a little in the sky). In order to really get it right, I put a temporary curves adjustment above the sky to make it very contrasty- this made it very easy to find and fix even subtle spots.
• Put a few of my original shots in layers above the HDR, set them to “lighten”, and used a layer mask to paint in the headlights and tailights of cars. This is done because of the purple artifacts you get from the cars moving from frame to frame. After doing a few of these, I used a healing brush to get any stragglers (I used the 3 best layers, but the other 12 contribute to a few places and you need to clean them).
• Sharpened the image with “smart sharpen” (I take resolution, divide it by 100-150 to get a good radius, and then bring up the amount to get the right level of sharpening for the print I want).