Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/James H. Clark Center at night HDR-2

 
Original - Stanford's James H. Clark Center at night.
Reason
A good free picture of an iconic building on Stanford's campus.
Articles this image appears in
James H. Clark Center
Creator
Starwiz
[change to] Strong Support. I'm really drawn to this photo. For nighttime architectural photography, it doesn't get much better than this. The softness adds a dreamlike quality, and it's just a whole lot of fun looking through the windows, trying to figure out what's going on inside. Starwiz, whether or not this makes FP, you have a publishable picture here. Shop it around. Cheers, Pete Tillman (talk) 02:46, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
PS -- was the sky really that color?
Thanks for your encouragement, Pete. The sky here at Stanford is a kind of haze at night--there's a lot of light pollution, and you can see very few stars. My best guess is that it came out reddish because I exposed the base shot for the HDR (which I used without modification for the roof, sky, tree, and walkway) a bit more than the camera would have liked. I think it's cool, but it could obviously be changed if we wanted. --Starwiz (talk) 08:59, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Whilst a certain amount of tone mapping can certainly add to the encyclopedic value of a photograph I feel that in the case of this particular photo it's been somewhat overdone. It is too noisy and unsharp for an FP, and I think that a long exposure would have more benefit than an HDR shot in this instance. It's certainly not without it's merits, but not FP material. bad_germ 23:28, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Regarding the use of tone mapping vs. a single long-exposure, just keep in mind that this image contains exposures from 30s to 1/3s. That's a lot of dynamic range to try to capture in one exposure. (In fact, I originally tried to, and the result clearly isn't FP quality.) When we look at the scene with our eyes, we can look at only part of it at once, and our eye adjusts to the brightness of the part we're currently viewing. Essentially, I used HDR to try and duplicate that process with the wide-angle shot. The picture really does resemble what you see when you go there. That said, I'm not an expert on sharpening and de-noising. There may or may not be hope for improving this image in those areas, but I hope someone might be able to take a stab at it. --Starwiz (talk) 00:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - Not bad, but just not good enough of a photo for FP. Teque5 (talk) 04:16, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Support- Bizzare picture, kind of out of focus. But I'm drawn to it. ~Meldshal42 01:14, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Not bad, but images produced by EF-S 18-55mm lens isn't sharp enough, plus there is CA. Nice HDR though. --βαςεLXIV 12:10, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'll be the first to admit that there are sharpness and CA problems with this image, but I just want to stick up for my EF-S 18-55 lens here. We have plenty of FPs taken on cheap point-and-shoot cameras, and the 18-55mm is perfectly capable of taking pictures which are much sharper than those. I just hope this image doesn't give anyone reason to oppose other pictures taken on this lens. --Starwiz (talk) 08:53, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • The 18-55mm, both versions of it, are terrible. Chromatic aberration, poor sharpness even stopped down, poor build quality, a far cry from the newer IS version. Capital photographer (talk) 12:27, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        • I'm so sorry, I should have added 'for 100% upload' in my oppose. Just a clarification, I'm not trying to say that 18-55mm (Non-IS) is totally unsharp, but this image was uploaded as almost uncroped. Which makes me think that this image is unsharp. Images taken by point as shoot are mostly downsampled to smaller size first. Partial unsharp is not a problem, may be the 'out of focus' issue is the most dominant factor for bad sharpness. FYI, you may look at other 18-55mm user's opinion in the review. --βαςεLXIV 14:35, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Neutral Kind of out of focus, but I've never seen anything like it anywhere. I can't make up my mind. Thingg 16:33, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - Nice HDR.. And imo its sharp enough.. Yzmo talk 20:52, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - A better than nothing illustration, and a vast improvement on the previous version in the article. However, if it is an iconic building it would be helpful to have a shot in daylight. And presumably it is normally a hive of activity. There is artistic merit in the work, but I find it just a bit eerie and depressing Motmit (talk) 07:02, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - Too much HDR effect. Not realistic. Kaldari (talk) 22:04, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not promoted MER-C 09:17, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]