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 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).