Skyscrapers

For those of you who don't know, Kyra gave me a really awesome camera as a "push" present. The upshot is that I now have a really awesome photo setup.  The downside is, due to the timing of said gift, I don't get much time to go out, set-up, and take pictures.  This means that instead of heading out into the mountains to take epic pictures of mountains, stars, sunsets, and northern lights, that I have to stick closer to home.

This has lead me to start exploring urban photography, be it buildings, cityscapes, and urban parks.  My first foray into this world was the oh so well known "Kerry Park" shot of Seattle/Mount Rainier taken during the blood moon.



This opened up a whole new set of opportunities for me.  I realized that I could go out, play with my camera, take some pictures, and still be home in time for dinner. . . or something to that effect. This discovery lead me to what is perhaps my favorite picture to date, the Rizal Park shot. I saw an image on ChromeCast and really wanted to get a similar shot. It was an image taken of Seattle from somewhere south of the city.  It included traffic lights from I-5 swooshing through the city.

I spent a week "scouting" spots on Google street view that would give me the perspective I wanted.  I finally found some potential spots up near Rizal Park.  One Sunday evening, Kyra gave me a hall pass so I packed up the car and drove across town. The first thing I noticed upon arriving at Rizal Park is that it was one sketchy area. I really did not want to set up a couple thousand dollars worth of camera equipment and sit there alone for a few hours waiting for the appropriate lighting.

And now I wait.
Taken from my phone while waiting for the light

I hopped back in the car and drove around a bit.  A few hundred yards down the road I found an entrance to the off-leash dog park. Something told me to check it out, and I'm glad I did. I followed the path for a few hundred yards then noticed that there was a section of fence that had been removed. Not only that, but it happened to be right at the top of a good 15-20ft drop off so there was nothing between me and the view.  I set up the camera, the tripod, took a few test shots, and waited.


About an hour later, the blue hour began and I started shooting.  I wasn't really sure what I was doing, but I know I wanted the car trails so I needed a long exposure without overexposing. Additionally, I wanted to make sure the whole scene was in focus.  To accomplish that I needed to set the aperture at f/22 and let-er-rip.  I ended up with the RAW exposure below.

Zoom Zoom Seattle - RAW file (after cropping)
ISO400, 24mm, f/22, 60 seconds

 Honestly, I was quite impressed with the RAW shot, but wanted to lighten it up a bit, after playing around in lightroom for a little while I ended up with the final product as shown. The single biggest change that I noticed during post-processing was enabling the lens profile. If you flip between the two pictures, maybe you can see it.  To my eye, enabling the lens profile appears to "push" the middle back a bit and "flatten" the image. Anywho, here is the final product.  I really like it and am currently getting it printed on museum-wrapped canvas.

Zoom Zoom Seattle - final product
Specs in previous version, note the change from lens profile

Note, I'm still pretty new, and was even more so when this was taken.  I mentioned that I shot this at f/22 in order to a) keep everything in focus, and b) get a long enough exposure to get great car-trails. What I didn't know at the time was that shooting at high apertures reduces the sharpness of the image. I also didn't realize that you really don't need to shoot at f/22 in landscapes to keep everything in focus. In reality anything from f/9 to f/16 should keep everything in focus without loss of clarity.


Jack provided me with a few ideas on how to accomplish the aforementioned goals, but without loss of clarity.  It involves image stacking and I'll get into the details of that below. However, I forgot to mention a third goal, I wanted to accomplish goals 1 and 2 using a single RAW file so image stacking is kind of meh. Actually, now that I think about it, I think I may have a solution. . .neutral density filters. I can stop up, toss on a neutral density filter, and take the shot.  It may work, it may not, but I can try it.

I had fun with my first blue hour photography session and couldn't wait to get out and try another one, but from where?  I didn't want to repeat the same shot, but I still wanted something "Seattle". The city had recently opened a Giant Ferris Wheel along the water front and I really liked the idea of getting a shot of the Ferris wheel in front of the city skyline. After a few days of Google-foo, Nicole told me that Piers 62 and 63 were public access and had unobstructed views of the Sound and the City.  I took off from work an hour or so early and ran down to the pier to take a look for myself and take a quick test shot to see if I could fit the scene in the frame; everything looked good, I had the scene, now I just had to get down there.

The next morning I received a push notification from my Star Walk 2 app indicating that Venus, Mars, and Jupiter would be very close to each other in the next few days and that the best time to view them would be a few hours before sunrise. I thought this was perfect and called my friend Dan o see if he wanted to wake up very early on a Saturday morning to take some pictures of the city and planets.

The morning arrived, I picked up Dan around 5am and we headed downtown to the water front.  Venus, Mars and Jupiter were VERY visible so I figured this would be a great morning. As I mentioned earlier, Jack gave me the idea of taking multiple exposures, each with varying objectives, then combining them in Photoshop to create the final image.  I figured this would be a great time to try it. My goal was to get a blue hour shot of the skyline with and the planets.  To do this, the plan was to get three exposures, the first, exposed for the planets, the second for the city lights, and the third for blue hour.  The three exposures are below.

Exposed for Planets
ISO 100, f/9, 100 seconds

Exposed for Buildings / Sky
ISO100, f/6.3, 9 second

Exposed for City Lights / Sky
ISO100, f/14, 14 seconds

I took the three exposures, stuck them in PhotoShop and performed a variation of the Lighten blend mode, called "Screen".  According to the Adobe webpage, Screen looks at each channel's color information and multiplies the inverse of the blend and base colors. The result color is always a lighter color. . .The effect is similar to projecting multiple photographic slides on top of each other. the resulting picture, Morning Star, is below.

Morning Star
The three above, imported to Photoshop, blend mode set to "Screen"

After a successful "blue hour" I was feeling pretty good and figured that we should stay there throughout the morning and see if I could capture a good sunrise photo.  The difficulty with capturing any type of shot, sunrise, sunset, etc. is that if you expose for the sky, to get the pretty colors, then you underexpose the foreground; in this case the buildings.  If you expose for the buildings, then the sky gets washed out, or at a minimum, you loose the color detail.  So, I thought I would try another multiple exposure-blending. The two shots below were taken about 90 seconds apart, the first exposed for the sky, the second exposed for the buildings/foreground.

Da Buildings
ISO100, f/11, 1/8 second

Da Sky
ISO100, f/13, 1/20 second

The two shots below were taken about 90 seconds apart, the first exposed for the sky, the second exposed for the buildings/foreground. I imported these into Photoshop and tried all of the various auto-blend modes, but none of them worked out so I ended up doing it manually using layer masks. The result, Smoky Sunrise, is below.

Smoky Sunrise
The two above imported to Photoshop, manual blending

I hope you enjoyed reading about my first forays into cityscape photography.  I learned a lot over the few photoshoots Every time I go out, I learn a lot and have a lot of fun.  these were some of the more challenging post-processing shots so far. Additionally, they took the most time on a per-shot basis, but I enjoy it.  Given the new baby and the now rainy weather, I have the feeling that I'll be sticking close to home for a while.