You might recognize this building from two weeks ago. As I backtracked through my University of Texas campus walk, I came upon the same buildings, but at night. The daytime black and white of the Gregory Gym looked nice enough, but I prefer this picture a lot more, reinforcing my bias for nighttime photography.

The warm, glowing lights contrasted well against the bluish sky. The background clouds and the rising moon were a bonus, giving the historic building a painterly and magical background.

As you may recall, I was in the midst of testing the compact Leica D-Lux 8 and was really pushing the small sensor in this picture. I shot at an extra slow 1/4 second hand-held to lower the ISO as much as possible. I managed ISO 250, which was close to its lowest at 200. However, I underexposed severely to preserve the glow of lights on the facade and had to brighten the shadows aggressively. That resulted in more noise than I wanted.

I applied the latest software technology via Topaz Photo AI to significantly reduce the noise and sharpen the image slightly. The resulting picture was more than satisfactory and gave me confidence that additional sophisticated post-processing software can effectively augment the capability of a small sensor. I love it when I can push the technology, and it works out.

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