photomatix

I showed up early the other day for a shoot and ended up with a half an hour with nothing to do.
Might as well take a few photos i figured.
I set the camera on a tripod and bracketed my exposure over a 7 stop range. I wanted to see what photomatix would give me as i have not had much luck with it lately.
I ran all 7 images through photomatix and played with the setting quite a bit until i got the look i wanted.
I turned the strength all the way up and lowered the color saturation a fair bit. My other sliders ended up being quite far the the right side of the screen also (sorry as i did not mark down what they were). Once i was done with photomatix i saved the image as a tiff and opened it up in photoshop.
I did a bit of retouching and then duplicated my background layer. I applied a fairly heavy vignette in filter - distort - lens correction and then applied a layer mask and painted in the areas that i wanted to keep light (background). I then used the dodge tool set to highlights and a strength of about 8 to paint over the right side of the building a bit, was pretty dark. I hit the tree a bit also with it and some areas of the building. I then used the burn tool set to midtones and a strength of about 8 and darkened up the left side and middle of the building. I used this on the tree a bit also.
I then smart sharpened and did a curve to adjust the colors and was done.
I put the original photo below.