Passing clouds over Bratislava

I did not manage to post an update yesterday, as I got home quite late. But there is a new one today, with a photo I took yesterday :)

The weather was all over the place in Bratislava yesterday. It was cloudy, sunny, raining and it changed every few minutes. And it was also quite windy a bit higher up. So the clouds moved really fast. Of course, that immediately brought a thought of long exposure to my mind, and I took some. As this is the view from the new Old bridge in Bratislava, I had to retake the shots a few times. The passing trams cam make the bridge shake, and while it was not a big problem in such a long exposure, I still did not like it.

This photo is a panorama from two shots, each one from a single exposure. I used the 11 stop VFFOTO filter here to push the exposure up to a 60 second one (with F14 and ISO 50). Combined and edited in Photoshop.

And here are a few details:

The tiny cathedral

While I do use a tilt-shift lens all the time, I don’t do many tilt-shift photos. The problem is, if you use a wide lens, like the 17mm one I have, you can’t really create a nice miniature effect. You need to zoom in a bit, to compress the perspective. Without that, it just does not look right.

For this photo, I used a 90mm tilt-shift lens. This one works really well for creating miniatures, you just have to be a bit further away, as you can’t zoom out. This is a blend of three exposures, done in Photoshop.

The SNP bridge

I used this photo as an example in yesterday’s article on blending using luminosity selections, but I did not include the final edited version of it. So here it is. Actually, compared to the blend I have shown there, I only edited it as shown in this article on editing using luminosity selections. I used Levels to brighten the dark areas more and add contrast to them, and I also used color balance to make the dark areas colder.

This is a blend of three exposures, done in Photoshop.

Evening clouds over Bratislava

This is a quite common view of Bratislava now, after they replaced the Old bridge. For few years, with the old bridge closed off, and then being completely gone, this view was not accessible at all. Still, with the trams passing quite frequently on the bridge, getting a nice evening photo is not that easy. The bridge can shake like crazy. Even with this photo, I started editing a different shot, and then I noticed that the bracket were completely miss-aligned and bury. Luckily, I tend to do multiple shots in places like this, to be sure one is good enough. And one was.

This is a blend from three exposures, done in Photoshop.

Bratislava Majales fireworks

Majales is an open air festival held every year in the middle of Bratislava, next to the Danube river. And it always ends in fireworks. Today’s photo is from the festival in 2012, so already 7 years ago. I stumbled upon this photo when looking for examples for my article on Topaz Denoise AI yesterday, and I decided to edit it.

If you want a photo of fireworks in Bratislava, the next Majales is in two weeks. From the 3rd to 5th May. The fireworks will be in this same spot on the 5th at 21:45 in the evening. There will be a lot of people there, but since this is not the New years fireworks, it’s not as bad. For those curious about the event, here is the official site.

This is a single exposure, double edited in Camera RAW and then blended in Photoshop. I even used Topaz Denoise AI on this one, as I had to overexpose the shot. That created a bit of noise. And the results were again great :). I think it will be my main denoise plugin from now on, if it gives me such nice results on all of the photos.