The beautiful view of Vernazza

Let’s stay in Cinque Terre in Italy for another day. This spot is one on the steps above the town. But this is not the one, popular with the photographers (you can see the view from that one here), instead, this one is from a bit higher up. I like them both, but there is one major difference in photos. If you look closely, on this one, the tower in the town does not cut into the horizon line of the mountains behind. In the other one, it does. And for me that just does not looks right.

This is a two shot vertorama, combined and edited in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.

Blue sky over Manarola

I really like this view of Manarola, and of course it’s popular with many other photographers. Just to have a bit different photo than everybody else, I vent with a vertorama here. Like this I got much more sky and the sea, to make this very nice and blue. And the little ship

This is a two shot vertorama taken with the tilt-shift lens. Combined in Lighroom, finished in Photoshop. You can see how to create panoramas/vertoramas in Lightroom here.

Dusk over Vernazza

How about another panorama, another from Italy, another from Cinque Terre :). But today it’s not Manarola, but it’s Vernazza.

Vernazza is actually quite small. This was taken my last day there, so I wanted to hit as many spots as I could. So I started on the other side of the town (this spot) for the sunrise and for the blue hour I wanted to be at the opposite side. And it took me only 10 minute to quickly walk down to the center, and walk back up. If I can do it so quickly, anyone can :)

For this photo I used 2 photos, each one from 5 exposures. I started with Lightroom where I did few tweaks to the photos, exported into PTgui to create the blend planes, then continued in Oloneo Photoengine to create a HDR and then finished it all in Photoshop.

Sunset in Manarola

While taking photos in Manarola in Cinque Terre in Italy, I wanted a nice sunset behind the city. But I was there not during the right time of the year, so the sun was behind me. Still, it can sometimes work out, because when the sky lights up with colors, it does not matter which way you look. But not this time. Still, the sunset was quite nice, so I took few shot into the sun. even without the city it looked great :). You can see the view towards the city here.

This is a two shot panorama, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Down to the rocks in Vernazza

I posted already two photos from Vernazza, but this third one is a bit different. For this one I did not include the town in the shot at all, and focused instead on the rocks formation at the shore in the port in front of the city.

I decided to do long exposures that day, as it was very sunny and not really that great for normal landscapes. This is of course after the forecast for the whole week I was there was rain and thunderstorms :)

For this shot I used the 12mm lens, to get as much of the foreground I could get. Then I used the NISI filter holder on it with the polarizing filter and a Formatt-Hittech 10 stop ND filter to get the long exposure. The polarizer was not used because of the sky, but to get rid of the reflection on the water. You can’t really polarize sky on a 12mm lens, as it would result in a very uneven colors.

This is a two exposure blend of a 15 second exposure as a base and a 30 second exposure to brighten few shadow areas. Edited in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.