Photographed the Colorful New Shopping Plaza in Guangzhou

The new shopping plaza housing Apple store’s most recent addition to China – Parc Central, Guangzhou – fully opened recently, with brilliantly colored light installations, sculptures, and arrangements, all accenting the striking advanced architecture of the plaza itself.

This plaza is pure eye candy for photographers from a range of genres. The scene feels straight out of Bladerunner. More simply stated – it is cool!

So I took this opportunity to breakout and shoot a little night and light photography.

Later, when I got to processing the images, Google dropped it’s bomb announcement that their Nik Collection was now free to download. That gave me a great chance to see how the, now three, options for HDR processing stacked up to one another.

Wow! Nik’s process is pretty slick. It did not always render the best HDR result of the three options, but it absolutely has the most built-in control over the render.

I do not photograph for High Dynamic Range much at all. The wide dynamic range of Sony’s full-frame sensor and properly applied post-processing in Lightroom serves up tremendous detail in those shadow and highlight regions – enough to satisfy. That said, however, adding the Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 plug-in as an option – with its easy to use and fast results program – to render great looking HDR images, might make me consider adding a bracketed capture every now and then.

Thank you Google and Nik!

Here’s a brief look at the different interfaces between each application. Which render is your favorite?