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.

On The Road Again

On The Road Again

Our last real drive after a month in New Zealand went from Oamaru to Lake Tekapo. This is from the road to Twizel and suddenly we saw these amazing clouds. I have never seen clouds like that in Denmark. We saw them a couple of times down there.

This photo is 95% Lightroom processed. I have placed a gradient on the sky, enhancing the contrast and clarity, as well as bringen the exposure down a bit down.

Then I have on a global basis turned up the contrast to maximum, and set the clarity to +29. Shadows I have raised to the maximum, and the highlights I have lowered to the minimum. The Curves I have on the minus side (-13, -9, -22 and -44).

This is a very strong manipulation, but it is what gives the photo its look and feel.

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.

Up in the sky – Hyper speed

Going somewhere? It is from Sydney. Sydney has a great skyline and you can do all kinds of wonderful stuff with it. I got inspired by something I saw, shooting straight into the air with a wide angle. It really does things to the sky scrapers. I then added a little speed.

This is a 4 shot HDR – the fifth was shaken. I sat on the ground and shot straight into the air between some wooden pillars. I then did a standard HDR from 4 out of 5 shots, using Photomatix Pro.

I then imported the HDR and the 4 shots into Photoshop as layers, aligned the layers (because it was hand held). I blended a little, but not much. I then merged all layers to one layer. Duplicated that and used the filter radial blur, with a small setting, blended that in closest to the middle of the image and then I did another duplicate, and did another radial blur with more effect. That I blended in all around the edge. That made the strong effect of speed up into the air.

At last I did an additional Topas Adjust just to make it pop a little more, but I guess I could have done that with curves and vibrance too.

You can read about blending layers in my HDR tutorial here. Or the complete HDR tutorial here.

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.

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.

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.