City - Little Rock State - AR Country - United States
About
The sky was completely devoid of clouds when I took this, and I've been tempted to go out and just take some pictures of a partly cloudy sky some time to PS into this image, but I prefer not to do such things if I can at all help it. However, the more I look at it, the more I think clouds might make it harder to see the overall shape of the building, since white on white doesn't always work well. I used a circular polarizer, and since Velvia 100F is apparently more contrasty than its predecessor (Velvia 50), instead of coming out with a nice even transition from light blue toward the bottom of the image to darker blue at the top, it came out with a strange swath of dark blue cutting down diagonally through the sky at an angle, making more of a U shape. So, this I DID correct in PS, which caused some banding in the gradation. To correct this new problem, I had to add some monochromatic, Gaussian-distributed noise. I also had to use the transform->perspective tool to get rid of the vanishing point convergence in the lines of the building. At any rate, here's what I had when I got finished. Any suggestions on how to make it better? And thanks for looking! :)
Also, another little tidbit of information. The Arkansas capitol is a 3/4 scale replica of the U.S. capitol. It's the only state capitol in the country to boast such a design, and it's been used in many movies over the years as a stand-in for the U.S. capitol. In 1985, a pyrotechnics project that was meant to make it look like they were blowing up the building got a little out of hand, and the dome was badly scorched. Only this past year did they finally clean the outside of the building to remove the scorching and other staining that had accumulated over the decades, though I still think they should've left it. Not only was the scorching a part of its history, but the cleaning also cost us taxpayers millions of dollars. But, I'll get off that soapbox now before I really go on a rant. ;)
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