Bukit Bintang Crossing

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you… Bukit Bintang Crossing. This busy junction is often being compared to the famous “Shibuya Crossing” in Japan. Mainly because of its crowds and crowds of people crossing this intersection. Not to mention cars and bikes crawling along the intersection too.

This location was shot on the roof top of Lot 10 shopping mall, and was introduced by a fellow photographer friend of mine. He had already pre-warned me of the wall and fencing height being too high to take a good angle. True enough, it was. So, I had no choice but to climb on the elevated concrete that housed some flowers. Sadly, after a few tweaks and shots… the shopping mall staff came up and told me to come down as I was not allowed to climb up the concrete area to photograph.

Here’s what I got from the bracketing shots… from left being -2 stops exposure, center being the properly exposed and right being the +2 stops exposure.

As for any bracketing shots, my first step is to blend these 3 images into a single HDR image by using Photomatix. Here’s how it looks like below after merging into a single HDR image.

The blended result is OK… but the main e-billboard above the McDonald’s is a bit off with ghosting effect. The smaller vertical e-billboard on the left side was also a tad bit too bright. I also noticed the gloomy cloud above the cityscape was quite dull too. Lastly, those cityscape buildings perspective were slightly leaning towards right side. The e-billboards were fixed in Photoshop… except for the sky replacement, which was done in Luminar AI (I added slight magenta burnt on some of the clouds).

Finally, back in Lightroom, I just adjusted the perspective, sharpened the image slightly and here’s the final result below.

Shot with XT4 + XF 10-24mm F4 (10mm, 2-stops of bracketed shots of 2sec at F16, ISO 160)