The Chicago Theatre

The Chicago TheatreChicago

I had not been on a train before I decided to take the South Shore line from Indiana to downtown Chicago.

It is a great way to get right in the heart of the city without the mucky-muck of parking.

It’s pretty cheap too.

I had a list of buildings I wanted to photograph, but I also just meandered around the city. It was a few days after the Tower previously called Sears had some of it’s windows knocked out.

–Update November 16–

I’m an extremely humble person, it’s one of my many amazing qualities.

That means that when I’ve soiled the bed, I’ll step up and admit it. The photo above is over processed.

It doesn’t look good.

So I’ve decided to redo the photo. I give you, The Chicago Theatre (take II):

The Chicago Theatre (take II)The Chicago Theatre (take II) – View in Gallery

2 comments on “The Chicago Theatre

  1. I like the colors, but a little too much enhancement. How do you do this in Photomatix though. I have tried and have not gotten anything close.

  2. What settings do you use in Photomatix? I usually start with the “Enhancer-> Painterly” preset, and adjust the settings from there depending on the photo.

    I also use photoshop masking to add or remove elements, for example if I wanted to “fix” that blurry car in the foreground, I’d mask in one of the pre-enhanced photos, but I think it provides a sense of movement as-is so I left it in.

    In this photo I used one of the unenhanced images for the reflection of the sun off the building, because it looked better than the processed version.

    My 18-200mm also tends to produce some Chromatic aberrations (blue or red lines along the edges of objects) and I try to minimize or remove those as well.

    I also use a photoshop plugin to remove noise from the picture, especially for nighttime shots.

    I’ve been working on a video tutorial that explains how I create HDR photos. There are already some good ones on the interweb if you search for them though.