It so great for photos, when the city center is right next to a river. You get so many nice reflection everywhere :)

This is a manual blend from 5 shots, taken in Dresden, Germany.

One just cant return from Prague without more photos of the Prague castle. It’s just so dominantly placed above the city. Anywhere you shoot, you just pass a nice view of it eventually.

This is a manual blend from 10 photos, two series of 5 photos combined into a panorama.

And it’s Monday again, so a new process post for you. Today it’s a little more complicated shots, as I used different techniques here.

So here goes. To take this shot:

I did the following. I took two series of 6 exposures. One normal, and one with my finger in front of the lens, to block the sun. At first I combined the original photos in Oloneo Photo engine to get this:

after that I used Photoshop to blend it with original shots, and to correct the colors. So the layers I used, from bottom up, were:

1. Oloneo blended image
2. +1EV exposure from a second series, where I held my finger in front of the sun, to remove flares
3. Color efex glamour glow, used only on the clouds
4. high pass to add more details
5+6. separate color balance for the sky and the castle to remove the purple tint
7. added saturation to yellows
8. corrected colors on the trees newar the castle
9+10. added glow using a bluerd layer
11+12. brightened the dark areas to even the image
13. removed color cast from the whites on the castle
14. more color balance on the buidings, they were still too purple
15. added more blacks to the image
16. more brightening to the dark areas
17+18. Color efex Pro contrast, used more on the building and only a little on the sky

Continue to the full post, to see the original 0EV from both series.

Destination Budapest

And I’m packing again. Destination Budapest tomorrow morning. Again I have planed 5 days of nothing but photography. And as on Tuesday they celebrate the St. Stephen’s Day in Hungary, I can’t wait to take photos of the huge fireworks above the city. The weather forecast is great, so let’s just hope all works out :)

Frauenkirche

Yesterday I posted a photo from the top of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, and today it’s a photo from inside. This church is very nice, but you can see it has been reconstructed. It misses this feeling of years passed. You know what I mean. When you enter a church, you feel all those years that it has stood, but here, it feels just like another building. Still worth a visit.

There was no photography allowed, but as everyone around me took photos, so did I. Of course just handheld, the church was full of people and even standing in the middle was a problem. One good thing was, that the church interior is very bright, so even handheld I got fast times on my shots.

This is a manual blend from 3 shots.

Today photo is taken from the top of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) in Dresden. As in each city, I like to search for the highest spot, to get a nice overview of the area and also to try to get few nice shots. No tripods were allowed up there, and with the number of people it would be hard to use it anyway. But recently I got the Green Pod (you can get more info on it here http://thepod.ca/) and it worked really nicely there as a tripod substitute. The Green Pod is actually a bean bag, which you attach to the camera and it provides a flexible platform, so the camera stands still when placed on an even surface. This was the first time I used it, and probably not last time. Only thing I don’t like is, that the screw is fixed in the bag, so I can’t rotate it freely. But other than that, it’s a great help for places where you can’t use a tripod.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots.