Chicago Times Three

This is an experimental series of photos from Chicago. There were basically three series: night, daytime and early morning (before sunrise) until after sunrise. I tried to capture a sense of abandonment in the night views with streets relatively empty of cars and people. The daytime views are a playful look. This was helped with the popcorn-like clouds. Finally, I wanted to show the city asleep and then waking up with the sunrise. There are too many images of the Trump tower but I was fascinated with it being a height-challenge (you need a really wide-angle lens) and a reflective surface.

Here are a few technical details. Each is an HDR image. Most were handheld. The camera is a Canon 5D2 with a 14mm ultra-wide angle lens. Oloneo was used to process the HDR images using a realistic colorful preset. Some images had the keystone corrected using DxO's distortion filter. The images were cropped to 1200 x 1600 pixels and then run through Nik Software's noise reduction filter. Nik Color Efx 4 was used to bring out some details and to increase the color saturation. Nik's Viveza 2 was used on some images to darken the sky. Finally, Nik's Sharpener was lightly applied. I didn't spend a lot of time on some of these steps as the goal was simply to see if it was possible to create interesting images of an urban landscape by pushing some of the photography limits.