Landskab

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.