Looks like it was shot at night ... the sky, the bright lights and their reflection on the ground. Definitely looks dark

Thanks Tom! I'm gonna lighten this up when I get home tonight.

Everyone will have different settings of their monitors. And with LCD's now pervasive, brightness and contrast just don't mean the same thing.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alforque/94724137/

Good luck!

P.S. The HDR on this is pretty good; I don't see any choppy halos.

I'm not saying I don't like it ... your choice as to whether or not you lighten it up. Lights wouldn't reflect on the ground/ice rink (?) that hard if it was daylight ... right? And the glow in the sky in the upper-ish right corner looks like it could be the misty moon. Also, the buildings reflected in Cloud Gate look like they are basking in the glow that are Chicago's mercury vapor lamps

But again, I never said I didn't like it ;)

I just did the 8-step calibration process for mac monitors. and it still looks a bit dark. I should go to some electronics stores and look at my photos on a bunch of monitors to understand where my monitors are in the general range.

Tom, thanks! The thing is i like my photos to look vibrant. This one is a tad too dark. I was really excited when i was working on this image last night. And then i come into work and it's markedly darker than what i was seeing last night. Darkness can be ok. But since I shoot in HDR with raw files, i have a large amount of flexibility in how I handle the tones. That word "vibrant" is an excellent word for how i like my HDR shots to look.

I clicked over to alforque's test on flickr and my monitor is perfectly calibrated

It looks alrite to me. I kind of like the colors in it. It might look dark if we saw the contrast of it on your computer to now. Either way, cool picture.

i'm happy that the Park Grill logo is symmetrical