Today photo is taken from the top of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) in Dresden. As in each city, I like to search for the highest spot, to get a nice overview of the area and also to try to get few nice shots. No tripods were allowed up there, and with the number of people it would be hard to use it anyway. But recently I got the Green Pod (you can get more info on it here http://thepod.ca/) and it worked really nicely there as a tripod substitute. The Green Pod is actually a bean bag, which you attach to the camera and it provides a flexible platform, so the camera stands still when placed on an even surface. This was the first time I used it, and probably not last time. Only thing I don’t like is, that the screw is fixed in the bag, so I can’t rotate it freely. But other than that, it’s a great help for places where you can’t use a tripod.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots.

While in Prague I was quite tired from the Dresden trip (driving through the night and arriving at half three makes one tired :)), but at least one day I got up for a little morning photo shooting. Still getting up at 4 in the morning is not so easy, but I managed somehow. One would think that the trams would be empty at such an hour, but to mi surprise, they were packed full.

I made a little walk around the castle and the Charles bridge and got few shots. It’s so nice to have the area just for yourself, which is just not possible during the day.

I’m including few behind the camera shots, which I posted on FB during that day. Btw. I’m creating the multi-image frames in an android app called PhotoFrame. It really is nice and very easy to use.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots, taken in front of the Prague Castle. You can see here the Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk statue. He was the first president of Czechoslovakia.

As I was in Prague, there will also be some new Prague photos. I visited only few locations, but got some nice photos. The photo I’m posting today was taken from the Vysehrad area. That is a very nice church placed on top of a hill. It’s quite far away from the Prague castle, but with a nice 200mm lens you can zoom in for a good view :)

This is a manual blend from 5 shots. I hope the colors look good, as the photo looks differently on every screen I checked it.

So I’m back home from Prague and Dresden. Not for long this time, as in few days I’m off to Budapest. But until then, here is the first photo from Dresden I edited. I was only one day in Dresden, so I tried to make the most of it. To bad that the clouds you can see in this photo had a different opinion and it started raining right when they got above me. But still I got few nice photos during the blue hour from here and you will see them sometime in the next days and weeks (together with some new Prague photos :))

This is a manual blend from 5 shots. Taken by the Elbe river in Dresden. In the shot the Hofkirche and Augustusbrucke.

Tomorrow I will be back home from Prague, but until then, I got for you another process post for today. This time it’s a photo from a rainy day in Paris. So to get to this final result:

I did the following (layers numbered from bottom up)
1. 0EV exposure used as base
2+3. -1EV and -2EV exposure to darken the middle area
4. +1EV exposure to brighten the buildings
5. -1EV exposure once more, just for the sky (I didn’t like the result of blending)
6. retouched out the crane in the corner
7. used the +2EV to brighten few more dark spots
8+9. blurred layer and curves that brighten it to add glow to the photo
10. exposure to brighten the dark areas further
12. added a little saturation
13. pushed the color balance more towards green

Continue to the full post to see the original 0EV photo