My Kind of Town

Photo of the Day

While going through some older pictures for my best of 2012 post I came across this one of the Chicago River. I don’t know if it is good or bad, but I really did not research this trip in March that well. Normally I scout out some locations to shoot. I came across this scene, and thought that I was a genius for finding it. Little did I know that the same shot is very popular from the middle of the same bridge. Almost every photographer that I follow on here has shot a similar shot on their trip to the city. I still like the shot though, and it is one of my favorites from the past year.

Technical Data

This is a shot where I took great time to get it right. I did not use any presets here, but I just used my knowledge of Lightroom to tweak this to where I wanted it. I posted this shot straight from Photomatix earlier in the year, and it was one of my most popular shots. You can visit that post here. I really liked the Photomatix result, but something was just missing. It did not look real to me. Now with this shot I feel a bit better about that. The first shot was a three shot HDR image while this one was just using one RAW file in Lightroom. It is amazing how Lightroom has changed me a bit. I have realized that the RAW file captures enough data that I don’t need Photomatix near as much.