Berlin - Potsdamer Platz

Wow! This is so amazing! What a great assortment of architectural styles! I love the dramatic perspective you used for this composition and how you achieved super contrasts and tones. I am trying to figure out how you did it!

It is great work! Fantastic!

Excellent architectural photography. Great perspective.

it seems good when you do something else then your usual stuff :-) .. gives a bit WOW effect...

Dizzying perspective. I love it!

Amazing shot, at a first I though it was a fisheye lens but I see the it is a 10mm. Great pic and perspective.

 

I see you use duetone for the tones, have you trie to print it?

Can you get the sam tones in the printer?

 

It is an awesome picture in all sense!

Gustavo, thanks for stopping by ! No I didnt print it, but the duotone is probably good for printing (and the size of a vertical pano from 4 landscape formats is nice for a large print). My printer is not high-quality, and I will have to find a good shop for a hardcopy

Amazing shot perfectly rendered in perspective and tone. I thought of the city of the future before reading the caption.

Really impressive. And I don't know what impress me the most, the photo or the architecture. The 10 mm (or 16 mm) lens is great. Your composition is great. And this immense dome above the buildings is great (even so I generaly hate the modern architecture).

Regards, Henri

Henry, d?accord. I live in a small town with 1000 residents, and this short visit to Berlin was impressive for me, you can imagine. But I feel quite more comfortable in my home town...

Woouw, so different from your nature photography, but so good ! cheers Jana

A piece of art Carsten!

Carsten, I joint the others in congratulating you with this photo which is simply amazing.

 

If one should mention some reservations, we are here to criticise and not only tap you on the back, I would mention the limited variation of tones of grey and almost nothing really black or white - or maybe my screen is playing me a trick. If I had a photo like that I would go into photoshop and ensure greater pan of BW tones (threshold, curves and eventually the gradiants). Another critical comment could be made to the overall composition. Although most of the structuring lines and forms in the scene are leading they eye towards a the central dome, the tall white building in the background stands out as a competing point of focus.

 

But, as mentioned, an all together very impressive photo that should be a serious candidate for a POW.

 

Anders

 

Anders, thanks for detailed comments. Thats what PN is meant for, I appreciate all constructive critique. If you look at the histogram, you will see a quite uniform distribution from black to white, with a slight shift to the darker tones. I have tried a dozen different B&W versions, and stuck with this one but there also many other possible variants of course. For comparison, I show the color version. The tall building in the background is pointing to the same point as the other lines, IMO

 

Cheers

Carsten

This image has been selected for discussion. It is not necessarily the "best" picture the Elves have seen this week, nor is it a contest. It is simply an image that the Elves found interesting and worthy of discussion. Discussion of photo.net policy, including the choice of Photograph of the Week should not take place here, but in the Site Feedback forum.

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Thank you and enjoy!

Carsten,

 

Congratulations on being selected for POW. I remember seeing this photo a couple of weeks ago and thinking how fabulous it was. Excellent job with post processing. It looks seemless and the tonal range is superb.

Damn! Now that's a POW photo. This is the first one in a long time that I have no quibble or qualm about at all. This is a solid 7/7 and just a great photo. Why?

 

First I love the format. Panoramas have, of course, become increasingly popular in the digital age, but vertical panos from landscaped photos still seem somewhat rare to me and it gives this a really fascinating, different look. Second, I admire the technical difficulty in doing a panorama with this kind of lens distortion. I've tried this and haven't even come close to a useable result (what is your secret Carsten)?

 

Next, I love the composition of this. There is a beautiful line that draws the eye upward from the center building to the center of the dish, but it's a parabola, not a straight line. There is just enough sky to be fascinating.

 

If I had to find a quibble, then I'm not sure about the B&W. I think the conversion is great. On my monitor it seems to have good shadow and highlight. The duotone gives it an almost infrared look (which is what I thought this was at first) and the colors give the whole thing that Fritz Lang Metropolis look we talked about a few weeks ago. But, I still think I prefer the color. I like the modern (versus futuristic, if the difference is clear) of the color version. I love them both and they are both different, but if I hung one in my office, it would be the color one.

Hello Carsten, this is an awesome capture and I am glad you included the technicals, lense and all...helps understand how you pulled off such an incredible wide angle shot. I'll come back in the later part of the week for a little more...not that I can offer more than has been said already, I think it's really successful as a toned B & W. Technically, all photos can be improved in some way. Well done dudeman.

 

Best Regards, Bradley

Nice shot. I don't know if I care for the B&W treatment. Having seen the color

version, I think B&W is a good way to go, but as is the shot look unreal to me.

Still, this shot is a fantasic use of a fisheye lens.

Wow, a great honor for me ! Thank you all for comments and critique here. Bill, the lens distortion is indeed a problem with stitching wide angles, but this EF-S 10-22 lens has virtually no barrel at the wide end. And the case of colr versus B&W, I had a hard time to decide what I prefer but decisive was for me the tall building that is not so well defined against the sky as in the duotone. I liked how all the curves go towards an imaginary point in the sky, and the building contributes better this way, IMO.

 

Cheers

Carsten

Of course B&W seens unreal since humans see in color. Personally I prefer the B&W version over the color only because of the near perfect post processing conversion Carsten did. It gives it a cold steel industtrail look that I find fanscinating in this image.

I do agree with Will about the futuristic look of the duotone. I guess it's a question of whether one prefers a more realistic (color) or surrealistic (duotone) image. While I prefer the color, it's by a very slight margin. One thing I did notice, in the color version one can really see the sky through the tent-like structure at the top of the photo. But, in the duo-toned version, you lose that blue and the tent (umbrella? What the hell is that thing?) appears a lot more solid and weightier.

Daniel and Will, it is kind of unreal if you consider the B&W workflow, you see a blue filtered building against a red filtered sky... So what ? Those photographers who have seen a lot of B&W could feel uncomfortable with such manipulations putting various filter effects or channel mixer settings into one shot. But I love the almost unlimited possibilities of color to B&W

Bill, the awning and sky tones are less separated in the B&W, the price for the red filter - like sky toning I had to pay. In color, the roof looks probably better but all together the B&W conveys the atmosphere of this place better IMO

Beautiful lines, tones and comp. Very deserving to be POW. Berlin is such a fantastic city

for architecture. Thanks for sharing this and the colour original but B&W really makes this

image. Congrats!