Sunset by the palace

I love golden hours in the city. Last rays of ultra warm light on the buildings almost always result in great images. With Madrid it was sort of different. Most of the interesting buildings are facing wrong direction! Royal Palace isn't an exception. So instead of photographing warm light on it during sunset, I decided to capture some of the sky as well as the sun itself.

To make this photo I took 7 bracketed exposures, merged them to HDR and tone-mapped with Details Enhancer in Photomatix Pro. Some final tweaks to colour and contrast were done in Photoshop CS6 using Luminosity Masks.

Technical details:
Camera: Canon 5D MK II
Lens: Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS USM
Focal length: 28 mm
Aperture: f/16.0
Exposure time: 1/8 s ("middle" exposure)
ISO: 100
Number of exposures: 7
E.V. Step: 1
Flash used: no
Tripod: yes
Filters: no
Software: Magic Lantern 2.3, Photomatix Pro 4.2.6 (Details Enhancer), Lightroom 4.2, Photoshop CS6
Photomatix Pro settings: download