Down to the rocks in Vernazza

I posted already two photos from Vernazza, but this third one is a bit different. For this one I did not include the town in the shot at all, and focused instead on the rocks formation at the shore in the port in front of the city.

I decided to do long exposures that day, as it was very sunny and not really that great for normal landscapes. This is of course after the forecast for the whole week I was there was rain and thunderstorms :)

For this shot I used the 12mm lens, to get as much of the foreground I could get. Then I used the NISI filter holder on it with the polarizing filter and a Formatt-Hittech 10 stop ND filter to get the long exposure. The polarizer was not used because of the sky, but to get rid of the reflection on the water. You can’t really polarize sky on a 12mm lens, as it would result in a very uneven colors.

This is a two exposure blend of a 15 second exposure as a base and a 30 second exposure to brighten few shadow areas. Edited in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.

The huge sun at the horizon

And today’s photo shows what I mean. It’s a sunrise shot, with the sun in it, and still I used only one exposure. You can check out the original shot on the side here and yes, it is very dark.

There are multiple reasons to do it this was. First, I was taking this shot handheld. I would prefer to not, but if you ever been on the Burj Khalifa observatory, you would have seen that the slits in the windows are very slim. And since I used the 12mm lens, I could not get close enough to the glass with the tripod. So having the shot dark, makes it much easier to handhold it, as I used a shorter exposure here.

Secondly, you can recover much more from shadows than from highlights in RAW files. So keeping a shot like this darker makes it easier to post-process.

But as you can see, I could recover the detail from the shadows and I did not need a second exposure here. But, if I had one, I would use it, as that would result in a bit cleaner image.

Golden hour in Manarola

Let’s continue with another photo from Cinque Terre area in Italy. This one is for a change from a second town there, the town of Manarola. If you seen a photo from there, you probably seen a view like this before. It’s quite popular spot with photographers, and even the evening I was there, there were at least 10 other ones there.

To get a bit different shot, for this one I decided to go wide and with a vertorama. The clouds were great, even with the sunset behind me. Actually that day I had the best sunset there, and of course it was the day I was not shooting into it. What can you do :).

This photo I took during the golden hour, when the sunlight hit the town and make it look nice and golden. This is a two shot vertorama taken using the 17m TSE lens, combined in Lightroom, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Vernazza after sunset

This photo is exactly from the same spot I took the one posted previuosly. Just this one was taken the day before in the evening. The sunset was not the best, but the blue hour was quite nice. Blue hour usually saves the day if you get nothing for sunset anyway :)

This is a single exposure, mostly edited in Lightroom, with a bit of tweaking in Photoshop.

A sunny day in Vernazza

I spend the last week in the Cinque Terre area in Italy. I visited all the five little towns there, and I even got some nice photos. The area is just wonderful, with so many great views. But if you don’t like hills and crazy amounts of steps, I would not go there :)

Here is the first one, taken in Vernazza. As you can clearly see, the forecast for the day, rain and thunderstorms, was perfectly correct :). It was equally correct for every other day I spend there.

For this shot, I took 4 shots vertically, to make a panorama. I also used the Nisi polarizing filter, not that much to get more color in the sky, but to get rid of the glare from the water. It worked quite nicely. This photo was combined in PTgui and finished in PHotoshop.