I just could not get my camera low enough here. When you try to get a nice reflection from a puddle, you have to get as low as possible. Same here. To get the whole lighthouse in the puddle I had to be only centimeters from the ground. My tripod can get quite low, just the middle part is in the way. So in the end I took this shot with the camera upside down. It was quite fun to try and find the controls in that situation. I noticed how many thinks I do automatically, because when I though where the buttons were, I could not remember :)

This is a manual blend from 6 shots, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. For those curious, I use Lightroom only to organize my photos and do small edits on the raw files. This are usually just the removal of chromatic aberrations (really easy to do in Lightroom, hard to do in Photoshop), white balance and lens correction. I also sometime recover the highlights in the brightest shot and brighten the darks in the darkest shots. I do this if I see that I will need it later in blending, and you get better results when you do this on RAW files than on already exported files.

It’s quite fun to choose a photo spot randomly. For the photo shooting yesterday in Austria, I knew where I wanted to be for the sunset. But all else, was totally random. We just went along the road and when we seen something interesting, we stopped and took few photos. Same with this chapel. It was close to the road, the sky was nice, so a perfect spot to stop for few minutes. Of course it wasn’t only few minutes and we almost missed the sunset because of it :)

This is a manual blend from two shots, edited in Photoshop. I had no need for the rest of exposures, as the whole scene was lighten by the sun and there were almost no shadows.

Autumn is so unpredictable. You newer know what sunset you would get. But today, it was perfect. After the last week, when we had grey clouds and rain, it broke up today to gave a stunning light show. And as luck would have it, for today I had a small trip to Autria arranged with Rastislav from Roadfolks (check out his FB page here http://www.facebook.com/Roadfolks). We arrived to this Lighthouse on the Neusiedler See just in time to catch it, but it was so worth it. I actually wanted to visit this lighthouse for a longer time, as it is one closest to my home, and probably the only one in central Europe (could be more, but this is the only one I know about :)). Today I’m also including a little behind the camera shot. I’m always posting some when I’m taking photos somewhere, but they are usually only on my Facebook page, so you can see more there.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots. I mostly just brightened the foreground.

I usually don’t take many photos like this. As in HDR you tend to expand the dynamic range to capture everything, this goes completely the other way. But as I was standing there an taking photos, this couple moved exactly between me and the sunset, and I just had to take this shot. I even took only one bracket, as I knew that this would be a silhouette and nothing else. I also left the foreground a little brighter than complete black, so you can see where they were standing. It’s actually on top of a hill above Hainburg in Austria. It’s a really nice place with a great view, just a little dangerous after dark. You have to be quite careful not to fall down :)

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

And another week passed and again I’m have for you another process post. For today I chosen this view of the St. Martins cathedral in Bratislava. So lets get started.

My goal in this photo was to open up the surrounding of the cathedral, so it’s not just black and you see some detail there. So to get this final result:

I first corrected the lens distortion and chromatic abberations in ligtrom. Then I exported all the 5 exposures as layers into Photoshop and continued from there. The layers I used vere (numbered from bottom up):

1. 0EV exposure used as base
2. -1EV exposure used to bring down the overexposed areas of the cathedral (I’m inluding here how the mask looks, so you can see what effect it has, if you don’t understand layer masks, check out this guide I written about them)

3. -2EV exposure, to correct few more overexposed areas
4. +1EV exposure, to brighten the overall image
5. +2EV exposure, to brigten few more parts and to add light trails to the road (again I’m including an image here, so you see how it looks)

6. added more detail using a high pass layer
7. I reouched out the small piece of the sky visible in the right corner, it just bothered me there
8. added 0.5 exposure to the whole image, except the brightest parts
9. Color efex pro contrast to add more local contrast to the image
10. color balance for the trees in the foreground as they were too red
11. Color efex Darkne/Lighten center to add a vignete to the photo
12. levels to add a little contrast
13. desaturated the oversaturated yellows
14. added glow (check out my tutorial on this)
15. brightened the shadow darks
16. made the image a little colder
17. darkened the extreme highlights

And that was all. I actually stopped after step 11 at first, but that added the few more tweaks, as I was not completly sattisfied with the result.

Please continue to the full post to see the original 0EV exposure.