Even more fireworks

Let’s do one more fireworks shot. This one was taken close to the finish of the fireworks show when they were many explosions at once. I quickly had to change the camera settings, as they were so bright, all my shots were coming out very overexposed. Actually, when I take fireworks photos, I change the settings often, based on how the photos I’m getting looks like.

This is a single exposure, edited in Photoshop.

Fireworks over the Danube in Budapest

As I mentioned yesterday, let’s do another photo of the St. Stephen’s Day fireworks today. I really had a great view, to see all of them at once. Maybe just form the castle to the left would be a nicer view. But it’s really hard to get a good spot there. The number of people in the city was huge, and a lot of spots are closed off during the fireworks.

Even the spot I got, under the Citadel, was only by luck. I got there 2 hours before the fireworks, and from my experience, that should have been enough. But to my surprise, the area was already full of people with cameras and tripods. Only by pure luck, a lady was leaving from this spot and I managed to put my tripod there. Next time I’m going even earlier.

This is a single exposure, edited in Photoshop.

St. Stephen’s day fireworks 2019

I have not posted anything yesterday, but I did go to Budapest in the evening, to try and get some photo of the St. Stephnen’s day fireworks over the city. And as you can see, I got some. So today, and the next few day’s I will post photo I got there.

This year I decided to go up to the Citadel over the city, to be able to see the whole show. Usually, the fireworks are fired off from 4 locations, but this year, they were done from 9. 7 boats and two bridges. They were really cool and I really enjoyed them. I did though overexposed a lot of photos, as they were crazy bright. Much brighter than I expected. Still looked good.

This is a single exposure, edited in Photoshop.

Autumn light

Don’t have any new photo, so here goes one from my archives, that I only edited recently. This one is taken in the Autumn of 2014, from under the SNP bridgge in Bratislava. I was still on the 5D mark II at that time. One good thing about shooting RAW photos, you can edit them anytime later, and still get good results. Sometimes even better as the editing software gets better with time too.

This is a blend of 4 exposures, done in Photoshop.

To crop or not to crop

The biggest reason I never cropped my images before was that I always felt like I was losing something. I always tried to get the composition I wanted right in the camera. But over time I just found out this is not always possible. Especially when you start using prime lenses or some ultra wider or fisheye lenses, you will inevitably capture more than you want or need. And that makes for a lot of empty space, like the extra ground, extra empty sky, extra walls and so on, that just doesn’t make the photo better.

This is an example of this. This photo was taken with the fisheye lens, and the extra ground just added nothing to it. Removing it made the composition tighter, more focused on the subject of the photo. And yes, I removed the camera shadow in post-processing.

The second reason to not crop was that I like consistency. I like it too much. It just feels nice when you look through your photos and they all fit into a nice grid, all with a nice 4:3 ratio, perfectly aligned. I very rarely even took portrait shots, as they would not fit nicely. I know, it’s a strange reason. But then, when I started to do many vertoramas and panorama, this was no longer achievable at all. Every photo was different, everyone had a different aspect ratio in the end. So instead of my photos being consistent in size, now every single one is different. And I think it looks even better than before.

Almost each of my photos is now of a different aspect ratio.

My last reason was the loos of quality. When you are shooting with a 12Mpix camera or even 22Mpix camera, cropping of half of the photo will degrade the quality quite a lot. But that’s really not the case anymore. Most of my photos now are 30Mpix to 100Mpix in size. I can crop away really a lot, and the quality is there. Also with the progress of the cameras and good sharp lenses, the quality of the photos is better, even if you zoom in. And with tools like Topaz Gigapixel AI, you can upscale you photo 2, 4 or even to 6 times the size, while still being of great quality. Gigapixel AI is probably the most impressive photo editing application I seen in a while.

This was a huge panorama, where I cropped really a lot from it. It’s still a huge image anyway.