Night

How to photograph something classic

Eltz Castle in Germany.

How do you shoot a unique photo of something that one million others have shot before you? It’s tricky and it requires preparation and patience, and in the end, the result may “just” be your version of a classic shot.

For a long time I have wanted to take a photo of Eltz Castle in Germany and finally, I got the chance when I came back by car from my exhibition in Paris.

I really wanted to have one that I had not seen before, but it has been shot to death and therefore no easy task. There is quite a steep walk down from the parking lot and the first time you see the castle is from a viewpoint you pass as you walk down.

As preparation, I had watched other photographer’s photos of the castle and studied the paths around the castle at www.openstreetmap.org. OpenStreetMap has a lot more details than Google Maps when it comes to paths and hiking routes. In short, I had some kind of idea how to area was arranged and the viewpoint was high on my list of potential shooting locations for my hopefully unique shot.

All shots I looked at when I Googled Eltz Castle without exception was shot at daytime, at various times of the year. I realized I could shoot a night time shot and that alone would make it a special photo and that was my plan.

I arrived well in advance of when I planned to shoot my “photo”. That is always a good thing to arrive in good enough time, to allow you to search the area for compositions as well as be prepared for the light.

I examined the different places to shoot the castle and shot various compositions. After having taken the classic pictures in … classic light (ie daylight), I decided to use the viewpoint. There are probably 10,000 photographers who have got a nice picture home from there, but I prepared myself to wait for the light.

When I had waited for 30 minutes I realized that I had forgotten my jacket in the car. Mental note for later: Always bring warm enough clothes. As the light dimmed the cold came too and the wind felt really cold and I still had a couple of hours ahead of me.

As I waited the clouds began to clear somewhat, from a total clouded sky to something with holes. That was good. A very nice little moon appeared, but of course outside the frame and the composition would suffer too much if I tried including it, so I ignored it.

After hours, the staff began cleaning up and driving back up using the shuttle bus.

Finally, they lit the light on the castle and just as I thought that I had shot the last shot, a car came up from behind the castle and while it picked up the last group of people, I set the camera to a 20 second exposure and I got my picture of Eltz Castle, which I have not seen before.

Sony A7RII, 24-70 f/4

EXIF: ISO 50, f / 8, 24mm and 20 seconds.

–Jacob

Tip: Pseudo HDR

Pantheon Reflecting the Sun Setting

Pantheon is one of the most beautiful buildings I have seen and I was even rewarded with the most beautiful sunset.

The photo is an old one, shot with my ancient Canon 400D. How to salvage an old photo? I took this photo as a single RAW on my old Canon 400D using a Sigma 10-20mm lens. I didn’t have a tripod, but the light was so gorgeous I just had to shoot the scene. What I did was to stand as still as I could and just fire away 20 shots hoping one would be sharp enough. The ISO I had turned up to 400, which is the highest acceptable ISO on that camera, and I the raised the f-stop to the highest value the lens allowed (lowest number). That gave me a shutter speed of 1/13 seconds, which requires a very steady hand. But I managed.

Tip: Try making Pseudo HDR photos from single exposure RAWs
In the processing had to major issues. I had to get a better balance between light and shadows and to increase the sharpness. To get better balance between the shadows and the light areas, I made a Pseudo HDR photo. To do that I made in Lightroom two artificial exposures by making virtual copies. One I made a -2 and the other I made +2. These to exposures I gave some strong noise reduction, and then I exported all three to Photomatix and tone mapped them. The result was awesome. Not as good as if I had shot three proper bracketed shots, but good enough.

The sharpness I achieved by duplicating the layer in Photoshop and then applying a fairly strong Unsharp Mask (really a bad name for a sharpening rool). That did some really good things to the roof of the Pantheon. I blended in the good parts of the sharpened image – the rest I didn’t use.

Stars above swedish cottage

In the autumn we went to Karlskrona in Sweden with some of our friends. At night the clouds cleared and with no moon I took a few shots at the sky.

What did I learn?
I learned that when it is so dark, you can’t really focus. You have set the lens to manual focus mode, and then learn by heart where the focus ring must be positioned.

About the processing
The photo consists of 9 HDR photos, but the sky comes from only one shot. The reason for that, is that the stars actually move surprisingly fast. An exposure of more than 15 seconds, will show stars moving. It’s really fascinating.

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 Royal Stables

Right behind the Govermental building Christiansborg lies the Royal Stables. The Queen has got a set of white horses, which apparently are rare, if they have to be really white. The horses stays in the building in the left.

About the processing
This is a typically double tone mapped HDR. I created it from 5 exposures in Photomatix. The double tone mapping gives this much more painterly and surreal style, which works well for some images. The idea of the double tone mapping is that, you first do one HDR photo and tone map it, and the image that you get from that process, you tone map too. This is done by pressing the “Tone mapping” button once more. A side effect of the double tone mapping is, that you get a lot more noise (grain) into the image. You have to clean some of it up, but not all. The noise adds some of the grittyness to the image, which is part of the effect.

The second time you tone map, the colors go crazy, and you have to lower the saturation. The luminosity you also want to bring far down. Exactly how far depends on your photo. But this step is what creates the mood of your photo. Try some of the other sliders, and see how they affect your photo.

I brought the double tone mapped image into Photoshop and did a lot of clean up and some noise reduction here. I took the sky from one of the original shots and masked that in. If you are unsure of how to mask/blend layers in Photoshop, have a look at my tutorial on blending layers.

Harbour Bridge Roskilde

Not exactly a big great harbour bridge, but nevertheless I do like it. It connects the Museum Island, part of the Viking Museum here in Roskilde.

The photo is a 5 shot HDR shot before sunrise.

EXIF: 21mm, f/10, 5.0 sec. It was my aim to get the longest exposure to be a maximum of 30 seconds (which is the limit of the camera on automatic). I had to raise the ISO to 400, to keep the f/10 at a reasonable small value (higher number). I want the keep the f-stop low, to keep the foreground sharp as well.

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.

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

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.

Lake Tekapo by Night

Lake Tekapo in New Zealand lies in 700m above sea level. The lake it self is the oddest blue color, though you can’t see it at night. It sits very beautiful between snow covered mountains. Lake Tekapo and the observatory on top of Mount John (which is right behind me when I took the photo) is trying to become the worlds first UNESCO World Heritage Starlight Reserve. One criteria for that, is that all lamps point down, to avoid ‘light pollution’. So I thought a night shot from Lake Tekapo was appropriate.
This shot is a single exposure taken during a full moon, which explains the light on the stones.

Caught In Pixels