Cityscape

Shoe Boat

Shoe Boat

I guess it’s no surprise that Amsterdam has all these lovely canals. You find house boats, construction boats and just small boats for cruising around in the canals. The yellow shoe shaped boat is one of the more spectacular ones I found.

About the processing

It’s a 5 shot HDR, that I processed with Photomatix. Nothing unusual there. Then I blended layers in Photoshop, to remove a little ghosting in the trees, not much there though. The photo still didn’t really pop the way that I had hoped. I had managed to get a not very pretty handle of bicycle in the lower part of the photo. In the end I decided on this cinematic format, cutting away the handle. The other thing I did like, was the hanging bowl of flowers, so I decided not to emphasize that too much.  I focused on the small Shoe shaped boat and the sun rays in the far end. Those I processed to be emphasized. The boat was a bit dark, I made it more light and the sun rays I emphasized using burn and dodge tools.

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.

The North

The North

In the heart of Copenhagen lies the Fountain of the Storck. This is from the day that iPhone 5 was released in Denmark. All around the edges of this square people where standing in line with purple umbrellas and raincoats from Telia.

About the photo itself. I have taken this with my Nikkor 14-24mm in rain at 14mm. This is very wide on a full frame camera (Nikon D800), but the objective was to make the fountain seem almost as large as the big building in the back.

Processing wise I had some really nasty areas on the photo from the raindrops and I have had a lot of pain removing them. It is an HDR based on 5 images, but it is a fairly straight forward HDR. Being 14mm photo taken upwards, I had some pretty bad tilting lines, that I have work much on to straighten up.

Desolate Central Station

Desolate Central Station
I rarely come by a central station that is as empty as this station, even at night time. I haven’t cloned anybody out or used multiple exposures to get rid of people or even waited for people to get out of the way. It just was empty – except for one single person (if you can find him).
This is a 5 shot HDR taken with a small tripod handheld on the rails of the stairs. There are way too many bicycles to get room with a real tripod. Denmark is a bicycle nation, only surpassed by Holland, I think.

Gods light strikes building

Gods light strikes buildingThis I took in Copenhagen. I had to kill half an hour in the middle of the day, and sat down by this lake in the middle of the city. I put on a 10 stop filter and a polarizer and started playing around with it. The fountains turns around ever so slowly, but with a 10 stop filter it starts doing funny things. This is an HDR made from 5 shots. My 10 stop filter has a pretty bad colorcast, so I have had to work a lot on the colors.
BTW: Never screw two filters together – these are still stuck, and I have had to buy a new 10 stop filter.

Travelling in HDR

Sydney Grand Harbour View seen from Hotel Shangri La.Sydney Grand Harbour View seen from Hotel Shangri La. Taken on the day I arrived tired to the Hotel. I’m glad that I took the photos the first night, because for various reasons none of the next three nights were as great as this night.
Sydney is a great city, that I would have loved to spend more time in.