Copenhagen

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.

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.

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).

University of Copenhagen

University of Copenhagen

This is the main building of the University from 1836. The University has fostered a few known people, one of the more famous is Hans Christian Oersted, who discovered elektro magnitism in 1820. This particular photo I took on 22nd of December 2012. I have been waiting to take it, but the square in front is always crowded with people, busses, cars etc. But this day, only one single car was there.

It’s a single RAW file that I have tonemapped to achieve this result.

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.