I just could not fall asleep yesterday. It’s possible it was due to the full moon shining directly into my bedroom window. But as the sky was very clear yesterday I got up and set up the camera on the balcony of my flat. Just for fun, to see what I get. And I was pleasantly surprised with the result. Even while shooting in the middle of a city, I got very nice star-trails. This gives me a lot of ideas where to try this next time :)

This is a blend of 86 exposures in Photoshop. The big bright line on the top is of course the moon. Looks almost like a falling asteroid, like in the movie Armageddon :)

The Narrative clip

Yesterday, finally after a year of waiting, I got my Narrative clip camera. For those unfamiliar with it, its a small wearable camera, that automatically takes a 5Mpix photo every 30 seconds. It also stores the GPS location into every photo. The main purpose of a camera like this is to document your complete life. I personally don’t plan to do that, but I will like to use it when I take a photo trip to a new city. I’m usually preoccupied with looking around for good photos pots, and this camera will make a very nice behind the scene documentation.

I tried it a little the last two days, and it’s mostly what I thought. The quality of the photos is on par with a last years phone and as they say, around 5% of the photos are ok. Many of them are blurry, but with the number of photos taken, you end up with enough good ones anyway. I will try it more on my next trip (probably the Dubai one) and will post a review and more sample shots later.

Two towers

Some photos are exactly how I would like them to be. Like this one. It’s nicely sharp, the colors are saturated, but not over-saturated, there is a nice clarity and it feels real, like if you were standing there. To bad not all my photos are like this yet, but I hope more and more are. There was this slogan in a commercial a long time ago “not always, but always more often”(does not sound as good as in the original German :)) and I try to have a similar view of my photos :)

This is a manual blend from 3 exposures.

For today’s process post, I chosen one of my new year’s fireworks shots. But before I start, just a little reminder, that if you would like a free eBook about how I shoot and edit fireworks shots, you just need to subscribe to my newsletter.

But let’s start, this is the photo will be looking at:

This was a single RAW edit, and the photo looke like this from the camera:

I started as always in Lightroom. As this was a single RAW edit, I did much more than I usually do. I corrected the lens distortion, toned down the higlights, added a lot of contrast and vibrance. I also corrected the horizon and cropped the image. After the edits it looked like this:

I then continued to export three versions of it. One normal, one underexposed and one overexposed. I loaded them all into Photoshop and continued with the blending. My main goal was to add more contrast and detail into the image, and to brighten the foreground. So I did the following (layers numbered from bottom up):
1. normal exposure as start
2. overexposed version to brighten the foreground
3. added contrast to the basic mid-tones (the photo was very flat)
4. Color efex Pro contrast to get more local contrast to the image
5. darkened down the dark’s of the image, to still add more contrast
6. underexposed version to darken the highlights of the image (castle and fireworks)
7. little bit of contrast, just on the fireworks
8. the overexposed version once more, as the foreground got to dark due to the edits
9. more contrast overall
10. desaturated a little the oversaturated colors (mask created using TK actions)
11. still more darkening of the dark areas
12. Color efex Tonal contrast to get more definition into the sky

And that was all. As you can see, most of the edits were just to get the contrast right.

Waiting for the Narrative clip

Sometimes waiting for something can be so long. Like this one. I’m waiting for my life-blogging camera, the Narrative clip, almost for a year now. And it should have been here today, but will be tomorrow. So I planed to post some un-boxing photos and more info today, but will do it on Wednesday (as tomorrow is time for another processing post :)) so don’t forget to visit the blog.

Purple everywhere

I read somewhere that the purple color is much more preferred by women than by man. Not sure if that is true, but in any way, I hope you all enjoy this photo. Even when it’s purple everywhere. It’s quite interesting how sometime the blue looking clouds, together with the yellow glow of the sun can create such colors.

This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine, and then blended with the original exposures in Photoshop.

Taking photos at the same spots can get quite repetitive. One tends to see the same compositions and it’s sometimes hard to find a new one. So for this classic view, I though to use a little bit of framing. And I also wanted to cover up the boring sky, so it worked out quite nicely :) I actually behave quite stupid here. I seen the composition, but then I walked across the snow. And I really wanted no footsteps there. So I had to find a new spot with the same view.

This is a manual blend from 4 photos. I took 10 in two series of 5, one focused on the castle, one on the tree. I then blended only those I needed.