I spent a couple of mornings at the top of the control tower at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in the company of Sandy Stevens, the airport’s photographer. The view up there is fabulous and our plan was to shoot panoramas just after sunrise and, hopefully, get spectacular light and an airport with all the gates occupied. On our first attempt, the light was horrid (hazy and flat) but things improved the next time and the shots looked great. I’ll likely post one over on Flickr once I’ve finished processing one and maybe post a section of it here.
In case anyone is interested, we shot from the walkway immediately below the dark windows in this photo (not the ledge with the security cameras but above this where the tower narrows). This allowed us to walk all round the tower and shoot in any direction. The view made up for the fact that I had to get to the airport by 5am both mornings so that we could be set up by sunrise!
Nice one Dave. The lighted tower against that very dramatic sky is perfect. Sometimes you can get these shots without HDR. This one is great!
Mark,
Frankly, this is a shot that I could have taken without using HDR though I would have had to do more work on it in Photoshop to bring out the tower detail and control the overall brightness.
Very nice image. I like the relative brightness of the tower against the darker sky. Nicely done!
Lovely picture at first look didn’t look like a HDR but then looked closer and can tell from the antennas that it definitely was a hdr.
Eje,
Darn it! You caught me out. I considered retouching the Photomatix weirdness around the antennae but decided I couldn’t be bothered since it wouldn’t be as obvious on the 900 pixel version of the image. Oh well, I guess I’ll need to open Photoshop on this one after all… 🙂
Good shot. I like the relative brightness of the tower against the darker sky.