Conde Nast in a Fog

Four Times Square, aka the Condé Nast Building, veiled in morning fog.

Walking south along Broadway on this temperate morning, I came upon this. It had been foggy since the previous evening. The iPhone 4S camera was able to resolve all the highlight detail in the sky, capturing the fog in full detail, which was what the picture is all about.

Lately, I’ve been keeping the iPhone camera’s HDR turned on full time. It seems to be its forté. The iPhone captures both regular and HDR images at same time, so you can see the difference, and if you don’t like it, you can simply use the standard exposure. There’s no down side. This is how the image looks without HDR:

With HDR off, the top of the building disappears completely.

Not only is there more detail, but certain colors which are difficult to capture, like reds for example, retain their richness. The shadows became a little darker, but if this were a low key image, they would have opened up. Even so, they are easily lightened in Adobe Camera Raw with Fill Light. However, Recovery does nothing to bring back the lost detail in the sky compared with the iPhones’s HDR feature.

I’m discovering that the iPhone 4S is one of the most capable, fully automatic cameras I’ve ever used.