And I’m back from my short stay in Vienna. I took quite a lot of photos, and I hope at leas some of them are good :) But for today, I will show you one of the more crazier shots. This is the St. Charles Church in Vienna. This is a great photo spot, as the pond in front of it, is usually quite calm, and so creates a very nice reflection.

The church is usually lit by very strong lights in the evening, but right around midnight they are turned off. So this photo was taken from midnight until around 2:30 in the morning. Overall I took 200 photos for the star trails (I used 190 in the end, as few were side-lit by the moon) plus additional 2 shots with shorter exposure from which I darkened few spots on the buildings. I used a fisheye lens for this, as I wanted more of the sky in the shot, while still keeping the reflection. With the 16mm lens, I could get the whole reflection, but nothing more. I corrected the fisheye distortion partially in Lightroom and partially in Photoshop.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 190+2, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 8-15mm F4, Focal length: 13mm, Aperture: 6.3, Middle exposure time: 30s, ISO: 250, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.19907, 16.37126

I already posted few photo from the Amsterdam canals, but this one is from a different spot than all the others :) There are just so many spots like this there, with every other street being a canal :)

I’m currently running around Vienna, and will be back tomorrow. So I hope I had some nice weather (I’m writing this few days before :) ) and have for you a nice new shot from Vienna tomorrow :)

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 4, Camera Model: Canon EOS 5D mark II, Lens: Canon 16-35mm F2.8, Focal length: 16mm, Aperture: 6.3, Middle exposure time: 12s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 52.36178, 4.895911

I’ve been neglecting the process posts recently. The reason is simple, they take longer to put together, and I’ve been a little busier with other stuff. But let’s look at one of my recent photos, and how it was edited :)

This photo is from Arnhem in Netherlands, and is one of my very few photos taken with a fish eye lens.

Finished photo

Original photo

As you can see from the finished to original comparison, the 0EV exposure was quite dark. This was mostly due to very strong light of the bridge, and the camera of course compensated for that. Additionally, it was a little more distorted than I liked.

So as usually I started with all the exposures in Lightroom. Here I only partially removed the lens distortion and removed the chromatic aberations. From here I continued in Oloneo Photoengine.

All exposures

Tweaked in Lightroom

Right here you can see how different the image looked only with few tweak in Photoengine. I still needed to correct few things, so I loaded the result and all the original exposures into Photoshop. First I cropped the image, to get rid of most of the visible parts of the lens in the corners. Then I did the following edits:

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. +2EV exposure, to brighten few areas around the horizon.
3. -2EV exposure, to darken the light on the bridge and the oversaturated green
4. merged copy, on which I retouched out the rest of the visible parts of the lens
5. brightened the ship from the +1EV
6. brightened the lights from the +2EV, to make them more visible
7. darkened the bridge pillar as it was too bright in the HDR, here I replaced it from the 0EV exposure
8. little bit of Color Efex Pro Contrast, to get more definition in the photo
9. little bit of Color Efex Tonal Contrast, to get more local contrast between objects in the photo
10. recovered few bright spot (result of Color Efex) from the -1EV exposure
11. once again repaired the bright light on the pillar from the -2EV

Merged in Oloneo

Finished in Photoshop

And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here:

Which do you like more, this panorama, or the one I posted few days ago (which can be seen here). They were both taken during the same evening, from different corners of the Bratislava castle fortification.

Probably most will say that the older one is better, due to a very simple reason. The tower in this one is right behind the bridge, which makes for a little worse composition. But on the other side, this view gives a more 3D feel to the scene. One just can’t have everything in one shot :)

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 2*3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones Adapter ver. IV, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 59mm, Aperture: 7.1, Middle exposure time: 8.0s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.14159, 17.10270

A little continuation of yesterdays post :) This is (almost) all the stuff I shown you yesterday, put together into a usable form. From the Gitzo tripod, through the Sunwayfoto XB-44 ball head, to the universal L bracket.

I’m actually quite pleased how the L bracket fits to the Metabones adapter. It is of course not created specifically to it, but due to it’s versatility, to fit any camera, it fits also that quite nicely. It moves the camera even a little more to the back, but that in my opinion even helps the balance of the whole setup even more. The only problem I noticed, is, that I have to detach the remote when I wan to go into the vertical position. If it’s connected, I’m not able to close the clamp, due to the cable.

After the first day of use (I had some interior photoshoot today) I’m quite pleased with the purchase. Just will take some time to get use how differently everything is being tightened, compared to my old stuff. Still need much more experience to do a review for it :)