I have blogged for a bit on the issues I have been having "finding my eye" with regard to taking pictures. Having been spoiled for the last 10 years with living in the Pacific Northwest I have found coming back home to Texas hard for me with regard to my photography. I miss the majestic landscapes of Washington and Oregon. As a result, I have had to find new things to shoot. The other issue I have with the greater Austin area other than a lack of mountains is that this is "BIG Sky Country" and usually there isnt a darn thing in it. To put it bluntly there is nothing more boring that a flat landscape and a never ending EMPTY blue sky. Lately, I have been in luck. It has been raining in Austin off and on which means we get thunderstorms and clouds. Being that I work downtown, I am literally blocks from the Texas State Capital. Being that my first degree is in architecture, I can always seem to fall back to my first professional love and enjoy shooting building. Yesterday, the sky was nice, the sun set at the golden hour was warm and the reflection off the building and how it was lit was perfect. Luckily for me I have been carrying my camera bag on potential cloud days. So, at the end of the day, coming up on 7:30 I went over to the capital and grabbed this shot. This is a single image shot with my Nikon D700 and my 14-28mm Nikkor wide angle lens. I set up with my tripod and waited for an hour for the light to get just right to grab the series of shots that resulted in this image. The final print once cropped is 27" wide x 13" tall. Shot like a panoramic, the cropping was to eliminate an underground gazebo that is in the picture but distracted from the overall composition. This is an HDR shot processed in Photoshop CS5 using Nik's HDR Efex Pro. The full size image looks really nice. The Nik Software is excellent. For the record I did try this image in HDR Darkroom, Dynamic HRD, Photomatix and Nik’s HDR Efex Pro. Consistently the Nik Software outperforms the others in terms of look, ease of use and general operation. My search for more things to shoot continues, but I think this was a good addition.

Canon AE-1, 50mm 1.8f Fuji Fujicolor Superia 200 35mm Film Framing set of iterative models through strategic opening in mounting panel