Salt Lake Temple and Auto Awesome

So after work the other day, I popped by the Salt Lake Temple and shot a few pictures.

Some I liked

Some I didn't like as well

But I gave another shot at an HDR photograph. 

I haven't been able to get the knack of HDR. Here's the mistakes I was making: 

To change the exposure of the image, I was changing the aperture instead of the shutter speed. Changing the aperture also changed the depth of the field of focus. This made it trickier for the software to overlay images. 

I was exporting gigantic .tif files from Lightroom to Photoshop Elements.  Elements really likes jpegs. 

So I shot five pictures adjusting the shutter speed then exporting them to jpegs before working with them in Elements. It seemed like everything worked swimmingly.

But the story doesn't end there.  One of the features of Google+ photo albums is that they auto-awesome your photographs. It's not opt-in awesome - this awesome is automatic.  Photos with similar backgrounds are put together in an animated gif type format, and they've now introduced the sparkly lights feature. If Google detects lights in your picture, it makes them sparkle. 

That is auto-awesome!