A Night at the El CapiTOON

Though it reopened last year, I haven't really had the chance to take end-of-night, empty park photos of the revamped Mickey's Toontown.  So last weekend, I made a Saturday night trip to nab a few compositions from this back corner of the park at the very end of the night.  This trio was among the last shots I got before security kindly ushered me out.  Unfortunately, due to the windy evening and my camera lens being switched to manual only, I didn't quite get proper focus on my long exposure shots, leaving me to have to make do with my underexposed of my HDR nighttime photo pairs.  

The great thing is that Nikon's superior shadow rendition allowed what would have otherwise look like a very dark scene to be mostly recovered!  The highlights were fantastic, since I had taken the underexposed shots to control for the bright parts of the photo. But even the dark parts were mostly revealed without too much grain.  I bushed out the segments that did end up a little messy, re-darkening them to keep the photos crisp, but ovearll, not a bad recovery for what I had initially feared to be a lost series of compositions of Toontown's crown jewel civic building, the El CapiTOON Theater!