Austin Skyline

Photo taken on a short trip to Austin, Texas, USA.

This is the view of Austin's skyline from the window on our DoubleTree hotel room. Since it was a quick trip (we just went for a meeting), I opted not to bring my tripod. I never intend to make that mistake again. This picture was taken with my camera laying on the ground of our small balcony, pointed out from underneath the railing. (Needless to say, I continually had a hold of the strap to keep my camera from falling to the ground 11 stories bellow.) There I was, on my hands and knees, with a three-ring folder under my camera to adjust the angle, trying to get a pic of Austin. It may not be as iconic as the skyline of New York, or as beautiful as that of Hong Kong, but it's the best I could do considering that I don't travel to places like that. In fact, this is really out of my element to photograph cities - usually I try to keep all indications of humanity out of my photography. But, I just had to try my hand at getting a photo of a city at night. I have heavily edited this picture in GIMP. I added a gradient to the sky to make the top look darker, extensively de-noised it (and I still didn't get all the noise out), edited the colors, cropped it, and touched up on a few areas.