Nashville Skyline in B/W

[AaronLLockhart]

 

[amolitor]

The clouds are very dramatic, and not overprocessed, to my eye. Well done!

The distortion (barrel and keystoning, I think) I find unattractive and distracting. It doesn't look accidental, at least, it's clearly a choice on the part of the artist, but it's not a choice I like much

The buildings look curiously flat. It's partly because they are backlit, but there's no real variation in tonal range building-to-building, which might just be the way Nashville is made, which is a shame. The skyline itself simply isn't that interesting. Strong compositional choice to bring it down to the waterfront and the river on the bottom, it gives a well weighted bottom to the image. There's still mot much to look at down there that's appealing to me, unfortunately.

This picture seems to be mostly about the clouds and the light, which are far and away its strongest points, and I think those are ill served by the relatively plain city underneath them. I'm not sure it's possible to shoot this sort of thing in Nashville in a way that appeals to me, but I think that if you could find more interest in the buildings, more tonal variety, and maybe get find a location where the ugly rectangular block buildings are less obvious (the ones at the right of the frame), it would appeal more to me.

 

[AaronLLockhart]

lol, thanks for the response.

To be honest, this was a complete accident. I had intended to do a full color HDR composite when doing this photo. The pictures I took right before I started this, I shot in Monochrome setting. I'm just an idiot and forgot to change it back before doing the bracket photos for this shot.

As for the barrel distortion... there shouldn't be any. I shot this from 35mm or so focal point, so there shouldn't be any barrel distortion at all. I know when I match the lines up in photoshop using guides, all of the lines match up to a perfect line as well. If you are speaking of the fact that the building looks like it's leaning to the right. That is elevation issues. The ground is actually going uphill in this photo, I simply leveled the ground with the shot to make it look better. So, if I had taken the shot leveled with the building (technically level) then the ground would have receded diagonally into the left side of the frame.

The flat tones, are half/half. A lot does have to do with the backlit subject. however, I took bracketed photos until near white. There were 22 bracketed photos in the making of this image. Starting from almost a pitch black frame all the way to pure white. So, the back lighting shouldn't have affected the tone very much. The other half of the problem lies in the fact that the majority of downtown Nashville is red brick.

I just thought it turned out rather nice to be a monochromatic HDR, so I shared it