Osaka Sky Tower

This is a crazy looking building with a viewing platform some 40 floors up bridging the two halves of the building. It boasts the highest external escalators in the world.

Viewed from below - the escalators are the structures going diagonally from the bottom left.




Osaka at night from the viewing platform - note there is no glass wall to spoil the images.

The night shots in particular look fantastic.

Thanks John. Osaka is a real world of difference from Kyoto even though they are relatively close to one another. It seems that every architect is trying to out do the previous wackiest building.

This is a hotel entrance.




A Pachinko Parlour - it's basically a gaming and slot machine centre - the whole building ! The building lighting changes colour over time.
Yes that is a climbing wall in the central hole.







Can you imagine living across the street from this ?




It seems Osaka doesn't know about the Kyoto Protocol on energy emissions/conservation.

This is a great shot. It needs some slight framing tweaking to try and remove the distractions at the edges and rotating CCW a bit to straighten up the main focus the walkway. Otherwise excellently exposed. nice one




These two are just a mess of lights and darkness uniformly across the frame with no depth to them. Here's an example with a quick edit in Lightroom to try and show what I feel they are lacking ..








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David,
Thanks for the response. I've straightened it up a bit but I think that throws out the top and bottom edges of the platform as viewed.




I appreciate everyone's got their own view of an image but your version of the Osaka city at night from the viewing platform to me looks HDR'd and the noise levels are what I was trying to avoid in my originals. Thanks for the advice though.

Doing a dirty edit on a small jpg will bring up the noise and HDR effect a bit. On an original RAW this could be avoided of course and deepening the blacks on the higher exposure portion at the bottom would avoid the HDR effect. but no probs.

I think the straightened first image is an improvement and surprised you got such an improvement given the skewed angles. I wouldn't have known where to start.

I like the night time shots and you have once again given me a view of the world beyond my own personal experience.

Steve,
A couple of years ago I got a copy of Photoshop CS3 off a friend of my son who'd started then left a photography course. It's far more sophisticated than I could ever use but the bits I've tried to work with have really impressed me.