A great end to one of my days in Dubai, was this beautiful Dubai fountain. We stayed around 2 hours in the cafe with this great view, waiting for the next show and always taking photos. When you see the first time how high the water goes, you will really be surprised :)

This is a combination of a lot of photo. The main photo was taken after the fountain ended. It was a 6 exposure HDR. I then used two separate photos of the fountain and one separate photo of the people in the front.

I haven’t shared any discount for my video tutorial series on the blog yet, so how about one. For the next two days (until midnight on Sunday CET) you can use the discount code “WEEKENDSALE” to get a 30% off the price of Master exposure blending video series. That’s around 15usd off from the normal 49usd price (So the new price is 34,30 usd).

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

Follow me on Instagram

I started posting more and more recently on Instagram, and even if it does not give a very good photo quality, it gives me the opportunity to reach more people with my photos. So if you are on Instagram, feel free to follow me there under http://instagram.com/miroslavpetrasko.

Night at the marina

Even in such a busy city as Dubai, one can have a nice calm time. One of course has to go out shooting at very late/very early times of the day. But you are always rewarded with some great views and magically calm waters.

This is a HDR from 4 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

I took quite a lot of car shots at the Worthersee, so here are few more. The first is a car completely covered in leather. I think I never seen one like this before :) Look cool, but I don’t think I would want a car like that. The second one is a model of a car, placed on the roof of the car. Quite a funny thing. The last one is just a car I thought looked interesting.

Let’s look at another photo, and how I put it together. For today’s photo I used 56 different exposures, that were all combined in a different way. This was my first experiment with shooting star trails in the middle of the city, and I was quite happy with the result. So let’s go :)

For this result

I started with 48 exposures for the stars.

Each one looking like this (you can’t really see the stars, but that’s normal :))

I edited them all in Lightroom, to remove lens distortion, chromatic aberrations and vignetting. I then exported all into layers in photos. The exported images all looked like this one:

I can’t show you the Photoshop file for the stars, as I forgot to save it, but what I did was to change all except the first layer to the blend mode lighten. I also played with contrast and levels, to make the stars more visible. In the end I ended with this result.

With this the first part of the photo was finished, not for the bridge part. I took additional 8 images as a HDR series.

I applied the same corrections to them in Lightroom as with the star shots, to make the blend easier. I then exported them all as 16-bit Tiff files and loaded into Oloneo Photoengine. There I changed the strength and contrast to get this result:

From here I continued into Photoshop. I loaded the HDR and the stars images into layers, and blended them together by using a selection of the sky and manually painting few areas. I then also applied Color effex detail extractor onto the image, to get more detail on the bridge and make the stars even more visible. I ended by applying more contrast and making the stars more whiter by using levels.

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: