High up over the clouds

It’s so cool when you are in high mountains, and you go up and up, and you get over the clours at one point. It was same when I took this photo in the Austrian Alps, at the Grossglockner High Alpine Road. If I remember correctly, this was taken from the highest point on the road. When I got there, the clouds covered everything around, so it was like walking in milk. But over time, they started to break up and you got some great view of the scenery.

This is a two shot panorama, each shot from a single exposure. Combined and edited in Photoshop.

Museum with yellow penguins

Today’s photo is from Prague. It’s the Kampa Museum next to the Vltava lake, not far from the Charles bridge. I don’t really like it that much. It’s a modern art museum, and while some of the installations around it look nice, especially the yellow penguins, most of them are just random. Like a pile of things just thrown together without any thought or reason. I prefer classic art, where you can see the stunning skill and dedication of the artists.

This is a view from the other side of the Vltava lake. There is this point where part where is this little cascade. Makes for a nice leading line here. This is a blend of three exposures, done in Photoshop.

Sparking Eiffel tower in the background

This is one of my favorite spots to take a photo with the Eiffel tower from. The road makes for a really nice leading line into the photo, and you can easily catch some car light on it when doing a long exposure. And it’s not such a popular spot, that most of the time there is nobody there. Not like under the Eiffel tower that is. And if you are there at the right time, there will also be this nice sparkling on the tower itself.

This photo was taken from the bridge Mirabeau in Paris, the left side to be exact. I really regret not doing this as a panorama. Looking through my photo library, I thought I did, as right the next photo was the view to the right of this one, but regrettably, I zoomed out, and no panorama software wanted to blend the files together. Sometimes it works though. If the overlap is big enough, you can sometimes create panoramas form photos that were just taken from the same spot with a similar view. Did a lot of them over the years.

This photo is a blend of 4 exposures, done in Photoshop. I used one as the base, one to get some detail in the dark areas and two to darken the highlights. I alro blended in some of the light trails from the darker exposures, so the road looks more busy.

And here is also a comparison to the original RAW file. This is actually not the 0EV, but the +1EV, as I used that one for the base of the photo. You can easily see, that I tend to shoot my photos on the darker side. This is simply because it’s much easier to recover shadow areas, than the bright areas from a RAW file.

Colorful evening in Amsterdam

Let’s do a photo from Amsterdam today. This is actually from one of my favorite spots there. You can get my whole list of spots in Amsterdam here, and while this exact one is not on the list, it’s really close to spot number 2. Just follow the canal and you will find it. The building on the corner is a bar, and it’s really hard to miss it.

To edit this photo, I split the RAW file into three and edited one for the highlights and one for the shadows. Then I blended them all together in Photoshop.

And here is also a comparison to the original RAW file. As you can see, I mostly kept the sky and brightened everything else.

Under the Matthias Church tower

Yesterday’s photo was from under one tower, today we have another. This is the Matthias Church on the right and the Holi Trinity statue to the left. If you ever at this place in Budapest, definitively check out the church. It’s very beautiful inside. And if you have the stamina to do so, try also to walk up to the top of the tower. It’s not the easiest walk, but the view is great. I think it’s the heighes point you can get to in Budapest, not sure if the Citadel is higher or not. Still, it’s higher that the city.

This is a two exposure vertorama, combined and edited in Photoshop.