Union Station

C & C please. I can't decide if this is under exposed or not. I'd appreciate any and all comments: composition, exposure, etc.

Thanks, George W

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Another shot from last night for you all to consider please.

George W

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I like the second one a lot. maybe a little darker and less yellow. I alyawy liked Union Station.

Thanks scorpio_e. I'll play around a bit with the color and the curves on the Liberty Memorial shot.
And yeah....I love older architecture like this building. It was quite a project when Kansas City voters finally approved the money to rehab the old train station. Worth it in my opinion....makes a great photo subject !

George W

#1. Nope. It's a night shot and is supposed to look like this. Anymore exposure and the bright areas would be way blown out. Looks just like it is suppose to to me.

Great work.

I like the first. I feel if it were exposed more the lights and the bright spots in the street would be blown out. If anything this gives you a lot of room because you can brighten up what you want while leaving the brighter areas alone.

Thanks for the replies everyone. It helps a lot hearing what others think.

George W

Both are terrific. Color of the light is what I would expect, probably some funky sodium vapor or some such. But it looks good here IMO. The radiance from the big lights is really quite nice.

I have to agree with everyone else here in regards to the exposure...it looks pretty good to me. I however really do not like the color balance here. It may be "natural" in that it's probably what you saw with the nakid eye because of the ambient lights, but to me it really looks very distracting especially considering the subject matter.

To me there are two ways of looking at this. If you were for example shooting these from a photojournalism point of view and trying to replicate the actual scene or something, the colors in this scene would probably be fine and what people would expect. However if this were taken more from an "art" perspective (meaning that this was intended to be printed, framed and hung somewhere) I don't think this is what most people would really expect or even want to see. For many of us, those awful orange street lights really hurt the ol' eye balls and really look quite unnatural especially from the stand point of a classical type of architecture such as we have here. In other words, if a person were to look at that building during the day, I'm willing to bet that it's some kind of off white instead of that hideous orange and I think most people would expect to see this in the same color references as they see it during the day.

As far as the composition goes...I do like the first shot, but I think I would crop a good portion of the bottom of the image out. Just my opinion here, but I really don't think all that grass and the sidewalk in the foreground really adds anything to the over-all composition at all. I'd trim this down to a nice "panoramic" view of the building and the fountain.

I think the second shot is nice, but I think I'd have gone with the rule of thirds here. Yea, the reflections are "ok" but I don't think they're really that prominent, spectacular or well defined to really dominate half of the image. I think I'd loose some of them and move your central line down into the lower 3rd.

Okies...just my $.02 worth!
Jim

Since there is so much c/c of the color, I have rendered them as black & white images. Hope you don't mind. I'm trying to show them in a different light.

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Byte size: ZERO | PHOTOBUCKET ERROR IMAGE

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Byte size: ZERO | PHOTOBUCKET ERROR IMAGE

He doesn't have Image Editing on Pat:o

Gail, you're absolutely right about that. Very sorry if I have offended anyone especially George.

No offence at all on the editing ! Thanks very much for all the comments. And yes, I really do like the way the B&W came out ! And thanks, also to Jim and Dave for your comments. I'll play some more with the images Jim. Gail, this is my first time posting in the "critique corner", so I had overlooked the editing issue....thanks for pointing that out....certainly, anything I'm looking for comments on, I'd love to see what others would do with the images.
Thanks again to all....this is helping me understand much better by hearing and seeing how others see what I snapped.

George W

Thanks for the kind words George, and keep those pictures coming.
Pat

Well, since the op gave the ok on editing, I messed around with the first image a bit. Here's what I came up with...

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