New York - The Story Behind The Image

This is the last in my little trilogy of pieces about my images which recently placed well in the Digital Photographer “Cityscapes” competition.

My image is of New York, more specifically Manhattan viewed from a waterfront park in Brooklyn. Shots from here were very popular in the completion and it is becoming one of the “must visit” spots for photographers visiting New York.

I first went to the spot the evening before and took some good shots of the sunset lighting up the sky. In fact I have one of these shots as a “Whitewall” (very expensive) print in my sitting room, so I was pleased with the results. But I thought there was better to be had. From research I had done I knew the sunrise would light up the front of the buildings and add colour and clarity to the whole scene. So after an early rise and interesting subway journey I was back at the spot about half an hour before sunrise. Despite the popularity of this spot for photographers I had it all to myself that morning.

There was a slight swell on the water and I decided to go for a long exposure shot to calm everything down and stretch the clouds. I was lucky that a few of the seagulls sat still for me during the exposure, but if you look very closely you can see a sailing ship moored at Manhattan had been moving about.

This was shot in RAW with my Nikon D810 and my Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 lens at 29mm. It was shot at f18 at ISO 100, which this lens handles superbly giving incredible depth of field across the shot. On the lens I had three Lee filters, a landscape polariser as I wanted the warm colours of the sun on the buildings to come through without any glare; a 0.9 stop ND Grad filter (the sky was a lot brighter than the foreground and the ND Grad filter balances this up by acting like a part of sunglasses on the top half of the image) and a Big Stopper which extends exposure time, in this case with all the filters the exposure time was 239 seconds.

In post production I increased the contrast and vibrancy over the whole picture. I also dropped the highlights in the top half to the image and opened the shadows in the bottom half which was still a bit dark despite my efforts to address this “in camera”.

I hope you have enjoyed these background pieces and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and ask.

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Dubai - The Story Behind The Image

My image of Dubai at night came sixth in the Digital Photographer Magazine “Cityscapes” competition. The image is of the Sheikh Zayed Road interchange in Dubai with the majestic Burj Khalifa in the background.

Before I go on a trip I look the pictures posted by local photographers on social media to get ideas. I saw a couple of versions of this image on-line and immediately knew I wanted to take it. After studying google earth I managed to work out it was taken from a balcony at the Shangri La Hotel. I contacted the hotel before I left the UK and got permission to go onto a balcony on the 42nd floor.

I arrived for this shot about an hour before sunset and took photographs for a couple of hours. In terms of the composition of the shot I was quite limited by the fact I was 42 floors up. I tried as best as I could to have the road running through the shot and the Burj on the left hand third line.

I used my Nikon D810 full frame camera with Nikon 16-35mm lens at 16mm (as wide as it goes). Everything was done manually and the image was shot in RAW. The aperture was f13, the smallest I use with that lens, which give me good depth of field. The focus point I used was the edge of the road running horizontally across the bottom of the frame.

It was obviously dark by the time I took this and I used ISO 64 to get the shutter speed down to 30 seconds. The long shutter speed gave the beautiful smooth light trails on the road.

I did not do much to the shot in post production except boost the contrast and vibrancy.

As always, if you have any questions, please ask.

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Vegas at Night - The Story Behind the Image

The photograph of Las Vegas at night recently came second in the Digital Photographer “Cityscapes” competition and was commended by the expert panel. It has won a few competitions recently so I thought I would take a few minutes to tell the story behind the shot.

Firstly, a little bit forward planning was needed in booking a balcony room with a fountain view at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, Las Vegas, it is one of the more expensive hotels own the strip, but the views alone are worth it.

The shot is taken with my Nikon D3100 camera. This is a crop sensor camera so it does not capture the same detail as my full frame D810, but the files are a lot smaller (14 megs compared to 36 megs) which was an important consideration.

The camera was set up on a tripod on the balcony with my 16 – 35mm f4 lens (wide angle) at f13. The shot was taken at night (obviously) so the shutter speed was fairly slow, at 3 seconds. The effect of a slow shutter speed is that stationary lights are sharp while moving lights, such as car headlights are blurred. This was exactly what I was wanting, sharp neon light on the buildings contrasting with blurred lights on the roads to give an impression of the dynamism all set against the jet black night sky.

The shot was complicated as the cars kept stopping at the traffic lights and therefore I could not get the shot I wanted in a single take. Knowing this I took lots of shots using an intervalometer (a device for taking shots at set intervals). I then took 10 shots that gave light trails along all the roads and merged them in Photoshop. This was actually very simple as I just stacked 9 shots on top of the shot of the fountain that I liked best and told Photoshop only to add light which was not on an underlying layer. I know I could have picked a more dramatic shot of the fountains, but if they were any bigger they would have blocked out other details in the shot and therefore this is the best compromise position.

I didn’t do much else in post production, except increases the contrast and saturation a little bit so that all the colours stood out against the dark. I also removed trails that a couple of aircraft had made in the sky as they were too much of a distraction (strange thing to say against all this action, but I know what I mean).

If you have taken time to read this, thanks, I hope you found it useful. If you have any questions then please just ask.

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