What is you favourite time of day to shoot photo? Mine is probably the Blue hour, followed closely by the sunset :) The best thing about the blue hour is, that even when the weather is bad, or just boring, you usually get a nice shot.

Like this photo, taken in Zurich. The sky is completely blue with almost no clouds, but with the water having another beautiful shade of blue, it still makes for quite an nice photo. This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

To bad the sky was not blue when I took this photo. That would create such a better contrast between the Matterhorn and the background. But I still really liked this photo, so I decided to edit it anyway :) This was taken right before the sunset, as the sun coloured the clouds as they passed across Matterhorn.

This is a single image, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. It was taken from the middle of Zermatt with a long lens.

I was going through my photos from the Switzerland trip, and I noticed that I haven’t yet posted any photos form the day I spend in Lucerne. So for today I chosen one from there. The thing I really liked there, was this opening in the water power plant, which created really strong waves in the water. So I thought of using the ND filter, and get these nice soft waves in the shot. And it worked out really well :)

This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine. I actually edited them twice, to get different brightness in them, and then blended them in Photoshop.

Free DxO Optics Pro 8

I came across another free software offer, this time it the DxO Optics Pro 8. And to get it, you just have to go to this page and enter your email address. So what are you waiting for? :)

Cloudy skies

I don’t really like photos with just white skies that much, but sometimes it can’t be helped. What I tend to do in those cases is just try to include as much of the foreground as I can, and as little as possible of the sky. Same here.

This is a HDR from 5 exposures, crated in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop. This photo was taken at the Schwarzsee uner Matterhorn.

How I blend HDR panoramas

Since today I’m sharing a panoramatic photo with your, I thought it would be a great time to remind you, that there is a guide in which I explain how I combine photos for HDR panoramas. You can find it here or in the sidebar menu.

Alpine panorama

I haven’t posted a panorama for some time, so here is a new one :) This one was take form the Schwarzsee under the Matterhorn. The sky was a little too cloudy when I took this, but the view was still great.

This panorama is 12000x3600px big and was created from 5 shots, each from from 2 exposures (I took 5 exposures for each one, but had no need to use them). If you are curious and want to see it bigger, you can find a 4000x1200px big version in my portfolio here. Just choose the original size in bottom right.  I’m not embedding the big version directly into the blog, as it’s over 6Mb :)