Night Time Errands in the Raw

I had to make a quick trip down to the office on Saturday night to retrieve the power supply for my laptop.  "Quick" is a relative term as it's quite a ways from my house to my office unfortunately.  I brought along my camera to get a couple nighttime city shots.  I was hoping the office would be running the fountain, but it wasn't.  Still, it's a fun shot and it marks the first time I could have used a wider wide-angle lens because I would have liked to have gotten more of the buildings on the sides in (there was no room to back up.)  I would have also liked to have taken it from a higher vantage point, but that wasn't possible either.

This photo is actually a pretty good demonstration of why shooting in RAW format is a good idea.  It's a single-exposure photo; no multi-exposure HDR involved.  Below is the same photo as it came off the camera with no post-processing other than the conversion to JPG.  Compare that to the photo above and you can see just how much detail lurks in the shadows of a RAW image that can be pulled out with some simple post-processing.  That never fails to amaze me.