Old and new

Bell tower near People's Park at Nanjing Road West...

Do note that this photo involves some trickery. One of the annoying parts of photos that involve sky, is that in certain conditions you can't get the subject and the sky in one photo to be exposed properly (not too bright and not too dark). If the sky is ok, your subject is too dark, if the subject is ok the sky is too bright. You get these white, washed out skies. Depending if the sky is actually blue or clouded also is of influence: clouded doesn't help. There's tricks to avoid this problem. One involves taking several pictures of the same scene with different exposures and merging them later on. And although I've never tried, I assume that involves a tripod, which I don't use on city trips, that's just too much. Then there's graduated density filters, which I don't own, and polarizers, which I do have but didn't try. I doubt if they would have helped.

In this case the sky was completely blown out. 'Blown out' on a technical level means the light is so bright that the sensor doesn't have a value for it. The value of the pixels goes beyond what they can hold, so they're left behind at the maximum, which is pure white. This also means there's no information in the blown out part. Adjusting brightness won't help to recover details, cause there isn't information in that part, just white.

Usually I don't mess with my photos a lot. I adjust the sharpness a bit, the contrast and brightness, fiddle sometimes with the white balance, but that's about it. However, in this case, cause I liked the composition, I decided to go a bit further and simply replace the white sky with a piece of Shanghai sky from another photo, taken a few minutes earlier. That's quite easy to do in Photoshop cause the white part is recognised by all kind of tools rather easily.

Otherwise the photo is genuine, those buildings are really there :-)

Click on the photo to see the big version...