500px

I haven’t been posting much to my 500px account, but I decided I will put some of my favorite photos there. And yesterday I put up the photo Epic sunset form Paris (http://500px.com/photo/46334820) and it actually reached the first page of popular photos there for today :). So I think I will put few more up there :)

By La Defense

I already had another bridge photo ready, but than I thought that it will start to get a little boring, with all the bridge photos, so I decided for something different. So here is one of the La Defense in Paris.

This is a HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine and then blended with some of the original exposures. The HDR was created from 7 exposures.

Ok, I know it’s not called the Inception bridge (it’s called the Pont de Bir-Hakeim), but if you have ever seen the movie Inception, you know why it’s so much easier to remember it by that :)

I took this photo quite in a hurry one early morning in Paris, while I was on my way to a different location, but I just could not pass it without at least few photos. I got it a little of center, and even with a lot of corrections, it’s still a little off. But not so much that it cannot be shared :)

This is a manual blend from 5 shots, all blending just to brighten the area under the bridge.

As Louvre was closed off for a filming, while I was there, I had to be a little more creative with my composition. So I tried going a little more with and angle towards it :)

This is a manual blend from 5 shots.

Art of Cityscape photography by Jimmy McIntyre

I get many questions about a video tutorial, and I plan to do one, but it will still take a lot of time until one is ready. But my friend Jimmy McIntyre recently released a complete series of tutorials where he goes through all different post-processing steps, including luminance masking. I’m still in the middle of watching them, but from what I have seen, he uses a lot of the similar steps as I do. I will post a longer review of the course later, but as Jimmy currently gives a 10$ discount for his Art of Citiscape course, I decided to share it now.

The course is normally 34.99$, but the current discount price until Tuesday is 24.99$. And if that is still too much for you, if you use the discount code “hdrshooter” you will get an additional discount of 5$ :)

You can get more info on the course and it’s content here: Art of Cityscape photography

Sunset light

Today I have for you another shot from Paris. This one was taken from the Eiffel tower around sunset. At first I thought I will play with it a little more, but my computer had a different idea. Nothing really worked as it should today. Very slow Photoshop, slow responses, horribly slow internet. I had such problems even uploading the photo, upload to smugmug didn’t worked at all. And I’m on a fast line. It’s just one of those day.

This is a manual blend from 6 shots.

To break away from the landscapes shots for a moment, today I have a night shot form Paris. It’s a little off center, but I just could not get to the center spot. There were too many people on the Traocadero, and the best spot was occupied by another photographer who was taking photos of that lovely red moon, which you can see to the left of the tower.

This is a manual blend from 4 shots. I’m sorry if the sky looks horrible. It looked so good as a 16bit file in Photoshop. But after exporting it, the colors created a horrible bending. I managed to correct that, but after uploading to Smugmug it created very ugly artifacts there and I haven’t found a way to remove those.