Christiansborg – house of the goverment

Christiansborg - house of the goverment

The previous photo ‘The Royal Stables’ I posted, I shot over at the right hand side of this image. The photos are shot within a few minutes, but as you can see, they are very different in nature.

About the processing
This photo is a single exposure, processed in Lightroom 4. What I have basically done, is to raise the Shadows to 100 and then lower the Highlights to -100. This move made the ‘mood’ of the photo. The next steps I did was fine tuning (using curves), raised clarity a little.

The last steps I did was cleaning up in the photo, like removing the shadow from the tripod, removing a nasty green color cast from a lamp.

As you can see, the mood is very different from ‘The Royal Stables’ and I like both, they are just different.

About the composition
My idea with composition was both to have a lead in line, using the edge of the bassing, and the second was using the lamp as a kind lamp like the tower on the the building. The lamp seems very large and has much the same shape as the tower.

The Royal Stables

The Royal Stables

Right behind the Govermental building Christiansborg lies the Royal Stables. The Queen has got a set of white horses, which apparently are rare, if they have to be really white. The horses stays in the building in the left.

About the processing
This is a typically double tone mapped HDR. I created it from 5 exposures in Photomatix. The double tone mapping gives this much more painterly and surreal style, which works well for some images. The idea of the double tone mapping is that, you first do one HDR photo and tone map it, and the image that you get from that process, you tone map too. This is done by pressing the “Tone mapping” button once more. A side effect of the double tone mapping is, that you get a lot more noise (grain) into the image. You have to clean some of it up, but not all. The noise adds some of the grittyness to the image, which is part of the effect.

The second time you tone map, the colors go crazy, and you have to lower the saturation. The luminosity you also want to bring far down. Exactly how far depends on your photo. But this step is what creates the mood of your photo. Try some of the other sliders, and see how they affect your photo.

I brought the double tone mapped image into Photoshop and did a lot of clean up and some noise reduction here. I took the sky from one of the original shots and masked that in. If you are unsure of how to mask/blend layers in Photoshop, have a look at my tutorial on blending layers.

Icy Sunset at Veddelev

Icy Sunset at Veddelev

I was a bit surprised still to find the fiord covered with ice at Veddelev, but I took the advantage of it, and got some close up ice shots. This is from the blue hour after sunset.

About the processing
It is 7 exposure HDR, that I merged and tone mapped using HDR Efex Pro 2. I just got a new laptop and didn’t get Photomatix installed, before going on a business trip to the states, which has forced me into using HDR Efex Pro 2 more intensively. I’m quite satisfied with the results I have been getting, though I feel that it is a little less flexible, compared to Photomatix. While doing realistic HDR photos, it does give quite nice results.

Afterwards I did some Photoshopping. This time I didn’t blend the tone mapped image with the original images. The result from HDR Efex Pro 2 was satisfactory enough. I used a filter in Topaz, just to nudge and pop the colors and details tiny bit. I then used a soft light layer to accentuate various parts to lighten and darken various parts of the photo, by hand painting. FinallyI did some cleanup in the photo.

Harbour Bridge Roskilde

Harbour Bridge Roskilde

Not exactly a big great harbour bridge, but nevertheless I do like it. It connects the Museum Island, part of the Viking Museum here in Roskilde.

The photo is a 5 shot HDR shot before sunrise.

EXIF: 21mm, f/10, 5.0 sec. It was my aim to get the longest exposure to be a maximum of 30 seconds (which is the limit of the camera on automatic). I had to raise the ISO to 400, to keep the f/10 at a reasonable small value (higher number). I want the keep the f-stop low, to keep the foreground sharp as well.

The Misty Ducks In The Pond

The Misty Ducks In The Pond

I’m getting better at stopping the car, when I see something interesting. This time I saw the mist on the pond, and the sunshine going through the mist. The car went over the curb and luckily nobody was just behind me. Kind of stupid to drive so crazy; it was in a round about, and I could just have taken another round, but I got excited. Notice how the sun shines in one tree, but not the rest.

About the composition

I placed the sun behind the tree. It gave less power from the sun. It is about an hour after sunrise, an the sun is quite strong. I used the rim of the pond as a lead in line, but also the sun coming through the mist on the lake works as a lead in line.

About the processing

This is an HDR from 9 shots with one EV step between each shot. I used Photomatix to make the tone mapped image, and then I copied all 9 original shots plus the tone mapped into Photoshop as layers. The ducks were not exactly sitting ducks, so I had to mask them in from individual images to de-ghost them. I then removed all bluish colors, giving this almost black and white look with a golden glow, and a little green grass. In the foreground I removed a ton of leaves and floating feathers from the water.

Kings Square Metro

After a barbeque evening at work, I walked slowly through the center of Copenhagen towards the Central Station. At Kings Square, next to the Danish Royal Theatre (the building on the left) is entrance to the Metro. The Copenhagen Metro is a new one, only about 10 years old. It has driverless trains and a very futuristic look. I may go down at shoot some there aswell.

About the composition

I rested the camera on the rails going down into the metro. This gives strong lead in lines from the rails. The edge of the stairwell also works as lead in lines. Above ground the buildings also works as lead in lines. There’s a lot of lead in lines in this photo.

About the processing

This is a 5 shot HDR photo, ranging from -2 to +2, with one EV step between each. Actually this is the second time I processed this photo. The first time I missed the fact that my camera had moved slightly between two shots. This was visible only in some parts of the photo if viewed at a 100%. This time I made sure, that auto-align was selected in Photomatix. This is a photo with mixed light. Electrical underground and natural evening light above ground. This gives two different white ballances. This gave me a very bluish color to everything outside of the metro. I removed a lot of the blue and cyan colors by duplicating the layer in Photoshop, pressing CTRL+U and then select the blue color. I then turned down the saturation. And then I did the same for cyan. Then I closed the dialog, added a layer mask, and then painted on the layer mask so that I mixed in what I liked from each layer. You can see details about how to blend layers in Photoshop here.

How to handle moving things

There was a lot of trafic of people going up and down the stairs, the guy with bicycle and cars and busses going by. I had fairly long exposures, so everything was kind of blurry, which looks cool with the cars. I waited until there were fewer people and then I was able to combine a complete staircase with no people, by mixing in 3 of the 5 shots. Being an HDR photos I had to adjust the exposure and look and feel of each of the photos before blending it in. If I hadn’t done that I would had light and dark patches of staircase, depending on which photo I used to blend in.

Raft in the blue hour


From one early summer morning close to my home town. A raft sitting in last minutes before the sun comes up.

This is a 5 shot HDR. I also attached a soft grad ND 2-stop filter and a 3 stop filter to get a longer exposure time. It is a fairly clean Photomatix image, only a little Photoshop’ing to keep the boat and raft sharp.

Worlds smallest skyline

Many years ago the harbour of Copenhagen was a busy area with big ships, industries, warehouses etc. Now a days as in many other big cities, the harbour has been turned into offices, hotels and living areas. This is Nordea Bank.

This is a 5 shot HDR that I took one morning on my way to work. I had hoped for a great sun set, but wasn’t rewarded with that. This is a double tone mapped image. A way you can tell is because of the more dramatic contrasts in the water. I have used the blending layer technique described in my HDR tutorial extensively on this image. The water is mostly the double tonemapped, while the buildings are mostly the single tone mapped and the sky mostly a clean image.

The sky had a strong blue color cast, that I had to remove and then I used Photofiltre Studio to extract gray colors. Something I learned from a guy in Denmark. This intensifies the colors, but it must be used with care.

Sunset over field

Sunset over field

A couple of weeks before the harvest, the fields looks lovely.

This is an HDR made of three shots (-2, 0 and +2). I took this handheld, because I didn’t have my tripod. To keep the shutter speed fast on all three shots, I raised the ISO to 1000, but kept the f-stop in the higher middle area, at f/13. I kept the f-stop this high to have everything sharp. The shutter speed for the 0 exposure was 1/250 sec. I had to try a couple of times to make sure I got a set, that didn’t have a shaken +2. Processingwise I used Photomatix to get my HDR. I got a nasty gray sky because I had no clouds in the sky, a bad side effect from making HDRs. In my HDR tutorial you can see how to handle a gray sky. When done in Photoshop I took the image back into Lightroom, where I raised the clarity and contrast a bit, did a little adjustments to the saturation of specific colors and finally added vignetting.

The spider at the gates of the old Citadel

The spider at the gates of the old Citadel

In the middle of the old center of Copenhagen lies an old citadel. The military still uses it, but there is public access. This is the exit tunnel on a cold winter’s day. I only got 4 of my 5 shots for HDR, because I had to run for my life, because a car came.

This is an 4 HDR photo (-2 to +1). I have worked this image quite a bit. First I did two tone mapped images in Photomatix. When I got the first one I closed the “final touch” dialog (I rarely use that), saved the first tone mapped image. Then I simply press tone mapping button once more. This gives a wildly colored image, so I have to lower the saturation to somewhere in the mid 40’s, and then I lower the luminosity to the minus area. This really gets the grittiness out of the image. In some places too much, but this I fixed in Photoshop later.

In Photoshop I blended in the lamps from the -2 image, and the closest area to the lamp in front comes from the single tone mapped image. The double tone mapped was burned out. The same goes with the cobbles in the road down in the middle. They burned out too in the double tone mapped image, so I had to take approximately 25% of the single tone mapped. Then I had to extract blue colors in Photoshop to get the right light outside (mark the layer and CTRL + U. and select the blue color and lower the saturation).