Hope St.

Hope St., a photo by Tony DeSantis Photography on Flickr.

Once again adding to my LA project, downtown LA early on a Sunday Morning. Lets see if I can give you where I am at so you can google map it.
I am standing in the middle of Hope St., to the left is the Sheraton Hotel. The small building at the end of the street is the LA Library. The tall building with the light at the top is the US Bank Tower. The first green light you see is 7th street.
I gotta tell yeah, I really dread getting up at 4am to drive out to LA. The alarm goes off and I contemplate rolling over and going back to sleep everytime. It's Sunday Morning what the heck am I doing. But once out and driving downtown on totally empty streets accept for the street people is pretty awesome. You just know tomorrow and for the rest of the week this area will be sick crowded. Not only do I watch my back for vehicles thinking about running me over and honking there horn as they drive by. But I do try to have eye's in the back of my head for any street people thinking my camera gear looks like easy money.

The Shot:

>Standard 3 Shot HDR +2, 0, -2,  ISO 400, F/8, 24-105L @24mm, Tripod and cable shutter release

Post Processing:

>ACR

>Removed All Sharpening, Removed Black,  Added Noise Reduction, Removed Chromatic Abberration

>Saved as Tiffs

Photomatix:

>Detail Enhancer

>Strength 100%

>Color Saturation 80%

>Smoothing (High)

>Luminosity 0.00

>White Point 1.601

>Black Point 1.348

>Microsmoothing 2.0 (Default)

>Microcontrast 5.0 

>Saved as 16 Bit Tiff

Post Processing CS-5

>Topaz Adjust-Color and Detail Enhancement

>Topaz InFocus-Sharpening Just the buildings

>Topaz Denoise-Sky only

>Color efex Pro 3.0

   >Pro Contrast

   >Tonal Contrast (Buildings only)

   >Glamour Glow (Street Only)

   >Bleach Bypass (13% Opacity)

>Adjustment Layer-Levels-White and Black points

>Layer-Fill tool-remove tire tracks in street (Very Distracting)

>Light Vignette applied

>High pass sharpening

>Cropped, Framed and Sized for posting