I take more city photos than landscape ones. But I would like to have more landscapes, but it’s sometimes hard since my work is in the cities. But here and there I get some. And for today, I have you one I took about a year ago in the Austrian Alps. It was taken near the Grossglockner High Alpine road, when we were on the way back down. I hope you like it :)
This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.
I like the look of star trails photos very much. But I do not get the chance to take them that often. One just has to have a bit of a luck with the weather to be even able to see the stars. I have not yet done a guide on how to do star trails, but I did post few processing posts, where I show how I edited star trails photos. You can find one here, here or here.
While at the Traunsee, the sky was just beautiful. So many stars everywhere and very visible. I first tried a composition with the mountains, but as the water was not calm enough, I got no reflection. So instead I tried the view with this little church on the top of the cliff. It was lit from the bottom by the city lights and it was crazy bright compared to the sky, but I was confident I will be able to blend it from multiple exposure. And in the end I was, even if it took more than 3 hours to put this shot together :)
It’s always good to think of photos like this in two parts. The base photo and the star trails you will put over it. For this photo, I took 3 exposures for the base, so I have something to blend the church from. Then I took another 90 exposure for the stars, each one at 30x f2.8 and ISO 800. I did a mistake and should have taken one more base shot for the cliff, but somehow I forgot. So I had a bit more editing due to that.
This made for a quite big Photoshop file, with the PSB size being over 15gb big. I did almost all the editing there, except few small tweaks on the raws in Lightroom.
And here are few details:
And I’m back. This was a very short trip. But we had luck and yesterday the weather was just fantastic. Wonderful blue sky, no wind, lovely colors from the shining sun. Just great. And before I get to a new photo, here are few shots taken behind the camera. The photographer in the shot is not me, it’s Pedro Kin from pedrokinphotography.com.
And here you have the first photo I took yesterday. This was taken in the small town of Traunkirchen, right at the lake Traunsee. There is this little part blocked off by this grass path, which creates a beautifully calm reflection on one side of it. I really liked the contrast between the two sides, so of course I had to create a panorama here. But as the water outside was not that calm, I decided to go with a ND filter to make it a long exposure one.
This is a three shot panorama, taken with the use of the VFFOTO 10 stop ND filter. With it, I pushed the exposure to be 30seconds. Panorama combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.
And here are few details:
Again :) I had one few years ago, but I returned it, as I had no use for it at that time. This time, I got a much cheaper one. If I find out I use it a lot, I will get a better one, but I think this one will be great for now.
So what I got? The XIAOMI Mi Drone 4K. It has quite good specs (4k camera, 12Mpix photos, 27 minutes flight time) for the price. And the reviews were all very positive. Also the video examples I have seen were not bad. I have not yet had the time to try it out, but I will very soon, so will post some test footage and photos then.
For now, only few photos from the un-boxing, more to come :)
For the photo today, how about another one from the Lighthouse in Podersdorf on the Neusidlersee in Austria. I just like to return there to get more photos. I still would like to get some star trail phtos there, with the lighthouse in the foreground, but did not have enough luck for clear sky there yet. Maybe next time :)
This is a two shot blend, done in Photoshop.
I have been trying the Surface Dial in Photoshop recently, as the last update added support for it. And wow, is it disappointing. It’s mostly not even worth mentioning. They only support zoom, history and brush settings. That’s all. No canvas rotation, no size settings for objects, no opacity setting for layers, nothing special. And its not even context sensitive. So if you switch to the zoom tool, it will not magically start zooming in and out. You still have to switch it in the dial selection.
With how many settings in Photoshop are just sliders, this could be used so much more. Just imagine being able to dial in an effect when you are applying it, or dialing in the opacity of a layer. You can just look at the Sketchable app, and see how it could be. It is really lazy from Adobe to just do it so they can say its there, and not really trying. But to tell the truth, I did not expect that much from Adobe recently. Their updates are really not up to par anymore.
For today’s daily photo, I chosen one taken during this summer at the 5 fingers view in Alps in Austria. The 5 fingers is actually a skywalk platform, that will allow you to go out into this valley and get just such a wonderful view.
And it’s not even so hard to get there, as there is a cable car going completely up to this mountain and you just have to walk about for 30 minutes to get to the view.
This is a two shot vertorama, combined in Lightroom, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. I still struggle a bit with editing purely landscape shots, as I’m so used to cityscapes, but I think I’m getting there. And as it’s again a quite big detailed photo, I included som detail images in this post, to show you how much you could see from there :)
And here are few details:
