Ever since we moved our studio from home to an office downtown Murfreesboro, I have found it quite challenging to take epic landscape photos in an urban setting. I have had a few successful attempts in the past, but I find it increasingly difficult to come up with new locations, style of framing, composing, etc. without repeating something I already have done.

Today's photo happened in a split of a second, as the clouds kept their color enough time for me to shoot a few consecutive frames, and then everything turned back to gray. After I took this photo, I placed the camera down on the wet walkway so that I get a much broader reflection of the building in the water, waited for the street to clear, and shot a few frames that turned out to be way too tilted. Which is the only reason I will try taking the same photo again, perhaps when the light is going to last just a couple of minutes longer.

For those of you who don't live in Murfreesboro, this is the MidSouth Bank branch which is just a block away from the Murfreesboro Square. And yes, this used to be a church... However, I don't know the entire story - I'll have to go socialize tomorrow at City Cafe and ask around.

As far as post processing, the final version is not all that different than the original. I did spent quite a bit of time putting a couple of RAW conversions together in one file and then worked on making it look as natural as possible with masked curves. Perhaps the thing I dislike the most in today's digital photography is the abuse of Photoshop in making ugly, tasteless HDR photos... so if any of you had that impression when you first saw the photo, please let me know, and I will gladly take it off :).

Thanks for stopping by.

Titus

Update: I figured out what it was that really bothered me about the post processing, and I think I fixed it (the street had too little contrast, which made the whole photo look artificial). Let me know if you think any different.

Update2: Here's a link to the original file exactly as it came out of my Nikon D300 with Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 at ISO200, -2eV, f/5.6, 1/160s: ../midsouth_bank.jpg.