Sparking Eiffel tower in the background

This is one of my favorite spots to take a photo with the Eiffel tower from. The road makes for a really nice leading line into the photo, and you can easily catch some car light on it when doing a long exposure. And it’s not such a popular spot, that most of the time there is nobody there. Not like under the Eiffel tower that is. And if you are there at the right time, there will also be this nice sparkling on the tower itself.

This photo was taken from the bridge Mirabeau in Paris, the left side to be exact. I really regret not doing this as a panorama. Looking through my photo library, I thought I did, as right the next photo was the view to the right of this one, but regrettably, I zoomed out, and no panorama software wanted to blend the files together. Sometimes it works though. If the overlap is big enough, you can sometimes create panoramas form photos that were just taken from the same spot with a similar view. Did a lot of them over the years.

This photo is a blend of 4 exposures, done in Photoshop. I used one as the base, one to get some detail in the dark areas and two to darken the highlights. I alro blended in some of the light trails from the darker exposures, so the road looks more busy.

And here is also a comparison to the original RAW file. This is actually not the 0EV, but the +1EV, as I used that one for the base of the photo. You can easily see, that I tend to shoot my photos on the darker side. This is simply because it’s much easier to recover shadow areas, than the bright areas from a RAW file.

Colorful evening in Amsterdam

Let’s do a photo from Amsterdam today. This is actually from one of my favorite spots there. You can get my whole list of spots in Amsterdam here, and while this exact one is not on the list, it’s really close to spot number 2. Just follow the canal and you will find it. The building on the corner is a bar, and it’s really hard to miss it.

To edit this photo, I split the RAW file into three and edited one for the highlights and one for the shadows. Then I blended them all together in Photoshop.

And here is also a comparison to the original RAW file. As you can see, I mostly kept the sky and brightened everything else.

Under the Matthias Church tower

Yesterday’s photo was from under one tower, today we have another. This is the Matthias Church on the right and the Holi Trinity statue to the left. If you ever at this place in Budapest, definitively check out the church. It’s very beautiful inside. And if you have the stamina to do so, try also to walk up to the top of the tower. It’s not the easiest walk, but the view is great. I think it’s the heighes point you can get to in Budapest, not sure if the Citadel is higher or not. Still, it’s higher that the city.

This is a two exposure vertorama, combined and edited in Photoshop.

Burj Khalifa lights

Today’s photo is one from under the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, UAE. It was taken right during the light show, that is there every evening. Actually, the reason the whole tower was red that day, is because it was the Chinese new year. They really like to change up the lights based on different occasions. I really liked these dandelions so I have them as the foreground element in many of my Burj Khalifa shots. I even wanted to go close to the tower to get a shot even more from under it, but the security guards were not happy with the tripod. Strangely, they have no problem with them in the tower, just outside. Photo rules are strange all over the place.

This is a single exposure, split into two and blended together in Photoshop.

Sunny day reflection at Lago di Braies

Today’s photo is another one from the Lago di Braies in Dolomites, Italy. I have most of my photos from this lake, as when I was there, the weather was best that day. This is a smaller part to the side of the lake. I wanted to do a photo from that little bridge, that you can see on the right, but there was a huge pile of broken tree branches in front of it in the water. And I did not want that in my photo. If you look in this photo, the spot from today’s photo was taken is on the left in it.

This is a two exposure blend, done in Photoshop. I used the 12mm lens here, to get a lot of the reflection in the photo.