It’s quite visible from my photos, that I quite often take at in the early morning and around sunrise. And you may be wondering why I do it, so today I will go through few points why to, or why to not go out to take photos so early in the morning.

Why yes

The light is different

You will see that right away. Same as with sunsets and evening blue hours, you have two very distinct times to shoo. But especially in the cities, there are not so many lights on in the morning, so there is much less light pollution. Like this, the light is different, and also the sunrise can create much dominant colors than the sunset.

Additionally, quite often due to the lower temperature during night, the weather conditions change. Quite often, especially when it’s too cloudy in the evening, the clouds break during the night, and you get the best sunrise sky.

There are no tourists

This is a huge thing, especially on popular spots. If you don’t want to have people in your photos, going to shoot very early will almost guarantee that you will have none. There are of course few exceptions, like for instance the Charles bridge in Prague, where you will always have someone there, but still, it will be only few instead of hundreds.

You won’t be disturbed

Another great thing is, especially in bigger cities, that early in the morning you wont be stopped from using a tripod. A chance that a security guard will go out and stop you during sunrise, is almost 0.

Very little traffic

Similar to very few people, you will also get very little traffic, if the sunrise is very early. Again, this will help you having more calmer photos, with few or no cars in them.

Why no

It’s very early

The biggest problem of course is, that you will have to get up very early. One gets absolutely no sleep, especially if you did sunset shooting the day before.

The lights may not be on

This can be a good and also a bad thing. There are normally two kinds of lights in cities. One are street illumination, and the second illuminate landmarks. Int he morning, the landmarks lights are usually off. So no lights shining on castles, statues, towers and similar. This may be great, if the lights were in you way in the evening, but may be bad if you wanted them in the photo.

The street lamps are usually great for a photo, but one has to be careful with he timing, as they are also turned off usually moments before sunrise (different in every city).

Places may not be accessible

One quite often problem could be, that some places are just not accessible during morning. There are especially public places, like gardens, parks, viewing platforms and similar, that can be closed during very early morning hours. If you are not sure, better to find out before hand.

It’s creepy

This is something one has to get used to, especially if you plan to go out alone. I do it all the time, and it still feels strange sometime. You just have to imagine the situation, where you are alone in a place, that is normally full of people. It’s empty, it’s very quiet and you notice every single movement around you.

Even taking all this into account, I still feel it’s worth it, especially if you are somewhere only for a short amount of time. Going out taking photos also in the morning, will double you chances to get a nice blue hour/sunrise/sunset shot and that that is worth it :)

Btw. all photos in this post are early morning shots :)

So today I did a little shopping, and got myself a new camera. And since it’s better than the Canon 5D mark II I had before, this is now my main camera, the Sony a7R.

You may be curious how I was choosing my new camera, so I will elaborate a little here. There are not many things I need from a camera. Actually it’s only two. Hight megapixel count and high dynamic range. Other than that, I don’t need much. I don’t use autofocus. I don’t use high iso. I usually don’t take videos. So the two are my main points I’m looking at.

Secondly, I needed something where I would still can use the old 5D mark II as a backup camera, so it had to be using Canon lenses. So no chance for a Nikon camera here (even if the Nikon D810 looks very nice :))

So in the end my choices were a Canon 5D mark III, Canon 5Ds r and a Sony a7R. The 5D mark III was removed from the selection immediately, as it gives me almost nothing new compared to the 5D mark II. So I ended with two cameras to choose from. And here is where price came into account. The 5Ds r gives me 14 megapixels more with a worse dynamic range than the a7R for double the price. And for me, that just not enough for so much money. So I ended with the only possible option, the a7R.

You may also ask why I didn’t waited for the a7R II. The reason is that I needed a backup camera. Recently I used a Canon 7D as a backup, but that’s not so great, as all my lenses are for full frame, and if I had to use it, the results would be worse. So now the 5D mark II will stay as a backup, which is a much better situation :) The A7R II may not be that far away, but until its widely available, it still will be months.

I of course also got a lens adaptor for the new camera, the Metabones Canon EF to Sony E ver IV. Will have to do some testing to see how all works together, but I hope all should be fine, and I get some great shots from this camera :)

Btw. doesn’t it look funny with a big lens on it? And this is just the 16-35, which is still a small lens :)

There was no process post last week, as I was away, but let’s get back to one this week. Today I will show you how I edited this night photo from Vienna, so let’s get to it :)

This was taken on a quite cold, rainy evening in the city, so as you can see from the original photo, everything just looked yellow. So thats was one of the main problems I had to correct. I also wanted to create more separation between the bridge, the water and the sky.

Finished photo

Original photo

I started in Lightroom, where I did my basic tweaks, like removed chormatic abberations, cropped the image and then also corrected the white balance for a cooler photo. Then I continued in Oloneo Photoengine. I just changed the strength and contrast. Nothing else. That how easy it is usually there :)

All exposures, tweaked in Lightroom

Merged in Oloneo Photoengine

From there I continued in Photoshop, where I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo result
2. Copy of layer 1, on which I removed the lens flare visible on the sky and on the bridge
3. -2EV exposure to darken the lights in the middle of the bridge
4. Darkened the bottom border from the -1EV exposure, as it was too bright after the merge
5. Hue/saturation, to tweak the light color under the bridge, which looked too red. Moved it more towards yellow.
6. Another Hue/saturation to tweak the light of the bridge, that looked too green. Moved them more towards yellow.
7. Brightened few dark spots from the +2Ev exposure.
8. I found one more spot in the water, which I removed on this merged copy.
9. Brightened the lights from the -1EV exposure.
10. Color efex Tonal contrast to add more detail into the water.
11. Added a little overall contrast.

And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here:

How about a sale for today. If you want to get my video tutorial series, Master exposure blending, you can get it cheaper for the next week. From now on, until next Sunday, you can use the code THIRTYOFF to get 30% off from the price (that’s 15USD) and get the tutorials just for 34USD.

To get all the info, and sample videos on the series, please check the Master exposure blending page.

and hear you can see the introduction video, to see what it’s about

A little off photography topic today. Today’s post will be about my experiences with moving my working computer (on which I edit all my photos) over to the Windows 10 technical preview operating system. Some of you may have already noticed that the screen-shots in the blog posts started looking a little differently. This is of course because Windows 10 uses a little different theme.

But first a little background. I quite like playing with new software, and I don’t mind it being a early version. I think at one time or other I had all available versions of Windows installed on my PC (and even Linux and MacOS at one time, but those never stuck around fro long). I even had Longhorn at one time, for those who still remember that system :) So when the technical preview for Windows 10 came out, I wanted to try it right away. But since I also have to work on the PC I did so only in a virtual machine. But as luck would have it, few weeks ago, the main HDD in my PC had a hardware failure, and while replacing it, I decided to go with a new operating system.

 
And here I my thoughts on it. Windows 10 works wonderfully for it being only a technical preview. It’s almost on par with the stability of Windows 8. I did run into few crashes, but what I could find out, there were caused by the graphic card drivers, which are of course also beta version. And since a lot of graphic editing is quite demanding on this, this is a cause for problems.

My biggest problem was with Nik plugins, especially Color Efex Pro, which crashed almost constantly. Luckily there is a simple fix for that, it’s enough to disable GPU processing in the settings. Secondly, Photoshop froze randomly in the earlier builds, especially when I opened multiple images. But that disappeared in the latest build. From a non-working point of view, I seen few games having problems with the same beta drivers, causing crashes.

Other than that, I had no real problems. One finds stuff that is not finished yet, features that don’t work properly or just a work in progress stuff. But for a normal day to day work, nothing from this really influenced my work at all.

What I like on the Windows 10 technical preview, and why I will probably stay with it is:
– it’s really fast, especially from the SSD hard-drive.
– modern apps work the same as normal programs. There are few that I like to use (Nextgen reader, Hyper for Youtube, Mail) and it’s just easier to have them in a window.
– snapping now work also for normal programs. Again, especially on a huge screen this is a big help. And it’s even intelligent, that if you resize a snapped window, and then snap another one next to it, it will fill the remaining space.
– it now supports multiple desktops and a much nicer Alt-TAB dialog. This all helps a lot with productivity overall.
– it shows notification (I can’t wait for Win 10 for my phone, so it synchronizes them between my phone and PC :))

 
Than there are some other nice features, which still need work. For instance the new browser Spartan, is currently just so much faster than Chrome or Opera, it’s just still missing some basic functions, and it’s quiet a memory hog. But the moment they correct this, it will be the browser I’m using.

So overall, my few weeks with Windows 10 were great. I was expecting so many more problems after the articles I read about it, and I seen very few. So if any of you want to try Windows 10 out, I can only recommend it. It will be, once it’s finished, a nice (free) upgrade to windows 8.

 
For those curious on what PC I’m running the system, here are the basic specs: Intel i7 3.4ghz, 16.0 GB ram, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660, Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB HDD, LG 34UM95 34 inch display.