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.