There is a ton of construction going on in downtown Kent right now. It’s been going on for the last few years as part of a push for rejuvenation, but has exploded in the last few months. This clock tower and parking garage all went up the last few weeks. I even shot the photo from a freshly redone addition to the campus’ main walkway.

I liked the idea of the original shot (on the left) but I planned making the image an HDR from the get go. The more I looked at it, the less I was thrilled with the shot itself, so I wound up making it a very quick and dirty edit. Basically, I took the RAW image and opened it twice in Photoshop, one exposed for the sky and the other for the buildings. I still wasn’t happy with the building exposure, so I created an inverted Level layer and painted it to fine-tune the exposure. After that, I did one final level layer over the whole thing to get it right where it needed to be. I thought of posting it there, but the lampposts were bothering me, so I took those out. This shot was probably WAY more trouble than it’s worth, but It’s good practice, I guess.