Sphere building in blue

I shared with you already few images of the Expos 2017 sphere building in Astana, and this is another one. I tried to have them in different colors, so here is one in blue.

This is a blend of two exposures, where the second one was used only to remove a flare from the photo.

Another rainy reflection

Back to Astana with today’s photo, with another rainy reflection of the Expo 2017 sphere building. It was raining the whole evening when I was there, so all my photos of it have nice wet reflection sin them :)

This is a two shot blend, edited in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.

Astana city center panorama

Let’s continue with another panorama today. This one was taken from the top of one of the skyscrapers in the city. It was right after a thunderstorm, so that’s why it’s quite cloudy there.

This is a three shot panorama, combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop. As you maybe noticed, sometime I use Lightroom and sometime PTGui for my panorama. The reason why I use both is simple. While Lightroom now supports HDR panoramas, it can’t create separate blending planes. It only creates one, already combined HDR photo. Since I like to blend in parts of the original shots, I need the blend planes. And this is what I can get from PTGui. So I use Lightroom only for panoramas, where I don’t use multiple exposures.

And here are few details:

Rainy night monuments

I’m not sure if it’t the rainy day, the cold I caught somewhere or that they switched time to winter time today, but I’m just so sleepy today. And I slept most of the day also. Still sleepy though. At least it’s Sunday and I had nothing else planed anyway.

But still, here is a quick update to the blog with a new photos. The one for today, is from Astana Kazakhstan, and combines the Expo 2017 sphere building, with the crazy abstract monument right next to it.

This is a blend of three exposures. The base, a darker one to darken the highlight of the statue, and a brighter one to brighter the dark shadows on the building in the background. Edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Passing clouds over Astana

Due to the weather I did not have time to take that many long exposure shots while in Astana. You just can’t use a filter when it rains. But the last day I had a bit of time and went to a great spot in the city center. Since the passing clouds moved quite quickly, it was a perfect time to do some long exposure shots.

For this one I used the 10 stop Formatt-Hittech firecrest filter, on a NISI filter holder, on the 12mm Laowa lens. Still, to get a long enough exposure, I needed to get down to ISO 50. I ended up using 60 seconds here.

The final photo is done from 2 exposures, one at 60s with the filter and one at 4s. Edited in Lightroom, blended together in Photoshop.