This is a picture I took of a church in rural Illinois as we were driving around recently.
Processing:
- Processed 5 exposures into PhotoMatix as HDR and applied one of my personal presets with some minor changes.
- Imported into LR2 and performed some spot removal.
- Edited in Photochop CS5 and used Topaz DeNoise to get rid of extra noise from the HDR process and then used Topaz Adjust to add some clarity settings which brought out the streaks of sunlght.
I was going to straighten the picture some so the bottom was level but then decided to keep it where the chimney and steeple were straight instead. Hope that doesn't hurt me in the voting.
Statistics
Place: 29 out of 115 Avg (all users): 5.8889 Avg (commenters): 7.2500 Avg (participants): 5.3043 Avg (non-participants): 6.1402 Views since voting: 1538 Views during voting: 355 Votes: 153 Comments: 14 Favorites: 1 (view)
Thanks for all the comments. I am a bit disappointed that this one didn't do better. I know some of the low votes were probably because the challenge was "Life in Your City" and this seems pretty country. This is actually a church just on the outskirts of town near where I live and describes the feel of a small town with high regard for moral values.
To those who think this is over-processed, I agree. I left my circular polarizer on and it caught the light streaming down from the clouds, but left some additional problem areas that required some extra processing. I didn't add the light through the clouds, that was already there and was brought out with the HDR.
The angled road was a tough decision for me. I straightened it twice and then went back and forth for a while trying to decide. In the end, I went with the steeple being straight and the road being crooked instead of the other way around and cropping that close would have messed the whole thing up.
I just want to thank everyone who voted high for it and it still amazes me that there are people who feel the need to vote 2 and 3 for a picture like this. Is this really a 2 picture? That's like saying this picture sucked so bad it wasn't worth the storage space it took to put it together.
Listed below are the 5 images I used to put this together. Throw it all into Photomatix and bring it up to visible and all the light from the clouds just comes right to the front.
Moved you from a 7 to an 8. By the look of the photo you should be in the top 5. The voters may not like the editing though.
Edit: I have this in 3rd place depending on the other voters like or dislike of your edit. You will either get 3rd place or be somewhere between 11th and 20th.
I LIKE IT! Although I think it needs to be leveld out just a bit. I bet you're gonna get the over-processed comments and all - but for me it's spot on.
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