Jerry, I'm going to get pretty critical because you've got a really solid composition on this, which makes me wish you'd carried that level of technique through the whole process. Instead, I feel that you've handled the shot somewhat sloppily.
I've benefitted so much from the 20 years I spent at Hedrich Blessing and because of their nearly century old legacy, I feel the need to maintain really high standards in Architectural Photography. I sincerely hope that you and any other's reading this will benefit from my critiques.
I'll start with lighting. It appears from the shadow on the ground that you shot this in the early afternoon. That would make this side of the house an East face, correct? Here, you've lost a wonderful opportunity to shoot the house at sunrise with golden sun lighting up the eastern facade. Instead, you've shot it with a rather arbitrary concern for lighting and used HDR to compensate. This leaves the geometry of the architecture feeling quite flat and the file over processed.
As for the processing, I'm not even going to get into HDR, but rather just the retouching... it's pretty obvious that you've painted the grass green. You can almost get away with this, but you've painted that color not just into the mulch in the lower left, but also onto the building face. This feels like hurried retouching that doesn't show a lot of respect for the architecture.
I apologize if this all comes off as a little harsh, but you're shooting with, what, over $50k in camera gear and the building doesn't even have any sun on it! You could have achieved far superior results with a Fuji XT1 at dawn.
I hope this can provide some positive direction as you move forward and I wish you luck in D.C.!
