High up in the Alps

I do like these huge panoramas. And the more I take them, the more I like them. I even vent back in my photo archive to find even more panoramas :)

This one I took in 2015 while visiting the Grossglockner High Alpine Road in Austria. This is a road that can get you very high up into the Alps, for just a stunning view. Of course you have to be lucky for the clouds to move away, or you will see nothing. Or as the day I was there, the clouds were first covering everything, but after lunch they moved and showed this beautiful view of the mountains.

This photo is a 66Mpix panorama, created from three exposures. Merged in Lightroom, then finished in Photoshop. I did take multiple exposures here, but did not use them in the end. Not sure if it was the wind or bad tripod placement, but few of the exposures would not align properly and instead of trying to fix that, was just easier to edit a single exposure.

And here are few details:

Passing winter tram

While browsing my photo archive, I stumbled also across this photo. And as I never posted it here before, here it is :) I actually took this one on the first January of 2017. It’s one of those perfect dates when to take photos. That, and the week between Christmas and New Years, are the times when there are very few people in the city centers. Everybody is at home or with their families, which makes the city a photographers playground. Each time I can I go out to take some photos.

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

In the fog

There has not been much snow in Bratislava the last few years, but what we have a lot of is fog. And the season for for is slowly already starting. Not that much yet. This shot is not from this year, but from 2016. I do think though, I will get some new ones soon :)

For this photo, I used two exposures. Blended in Photoshop, to get the brightness of the lights a bit down. Photos like this one are not that easy to edit, as one can easily crate a really strong color banding. But there are ways to get rid of it, and you can see my guide on that here.

This photo is not a panorama, I cropped it to this aspect. Usually I don’t do that, and keep the standart 3:2 aspect ratio, but slowly I’m warming more and more to the idea to give a photo the aspect it just fits the best. No longer keeping to the classic one. Probably from doing so many panoramas and vertoramas that are not in the classic aspect, I got used to it.

In the mountains

After the yesterdays city photo, how about we go back into the nature with the today’s one. I went back into my huge photo library (my Lightroom catalog show that it’s over quarter million, exactly 276 733 photos :)) and selected a photo I took under the Matterhorn in 2014. Funny how it still feels like only yesterday.

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. It’s takne in the area round Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps. Matterhorn is a bit to the left of this view.

Almas Tower

Today’s photo is a really tall one :) But the Almas tower is also really tall, so it fits. The Almas tower is right in the middle of Jumeirah lake towers area, near the Dubai Marina in Dubai. It’s really hard to miss due to the star shaped bottom. There is no other tower that looks like this.

I was standing on a balcony of a nearby skyscraper when taking this and I really wanted a photo of the whole tower. And I also wanted to get minimal distortion here. My widest lens, the 12mm Laowa was just not wide enough to get the whole tower into the shot, and I did not want to use a fisheye. So I went with a vertorama. I used the 17mm tilt shit and took three shots.

But even so, I could not get the whole tower into the picture. I was still missing the top. So here I did something I do in cases like this one. I first took the three shots I was able to get while shifting the lens up and down. Then, I shifted the lens as high as I could, and I tilted the camera up, until I got the whole top in the shot. Like this, the top photo will be distorted, but as the whole bottom part of the vertorama would be straight, I could correct that in post processing.

I used here 4 shots, each one from three exposures. Normally, I would combine this in PTgui, but that refused to put them together properly. So instead I used the new function in Lightroom, the HDR panorama one. It combined the shots really well, as you can see. I still had to correct few moving cars and people, but not much. In the end, I got a 80mpix image (the PSB was 5.8GB :)) that I’m really happy with :)

And here are few details: