And another photo from Castle ruins :) As this was what I visited in Austria, this is what I took photos off. This time it’s the Hinterhaus castle.

This is a manual blend from 5 shots. I wanted to have a nice foreground here, so when the wind stopped for a moment composed with the wall completely covered by plants in the foreground. At first I thought I would have to do a focus blend, but in the end using F22 was enough to get the whole scene into focus.

This post is for those who missed my two tutorial videos. They are not about how to edit photos, but about how to take them.

The first one is how you can use Magic lantern firmware on your Canon camera to get the brackets you need.

The second video describes different way you can take multiple exposures.

I hope you will find them booth useful :)

Of course when I already got on top of the Durnstein castle ruins, I had to take as many photos as possible. I just know I wont go back there that soon. So here is another one from there.

This is a manual blend from 6 shots.

And another process for a shot for you. This time it’s a blue hour photo from Prague. So to get to this result:

I did the following steps in Photoshop (numbered from bottom up)
1. 0EV exposure used as base
2+3. -1EV and -2EV exposures used to darken the lights and castle
4+5. +1ev and +2EV exposures used to brighten the foreground and to merge the lights from the passing ship
6. added detail using a high-pass layer
7. added contrast to the basic mid-tones
8. used Color Efex Pro contrast to give more local contrast to the image
9. used Color Efex Detail extractor to add more details to the buildings
10+11. blurred layer used to add glow to the image
12. brightened the dark areas of the photo
13. darkened the mid-tones using levels a little, to recover contrast

Continue to the full post to see the original 0EV image.

Destination Prague

Tomorrow I’m again off to Prague, to my usual late summer trip there. This will be the third year I regularly go there. Once in spring and once in late summer. So again the next few days will be spend taking more and more photos there. These time I will also stop for a day in Dresden, so hopefully I also get few nice shots there :).

From high up

This is quite a simpler photo, but I really liked the view. It just looks so peaceful, such a nice place to live.

This is a manual blend from two shots. Taken from the top of the Aggstein ruins in Austria. This is probably the village Kofering, but I’m not completely sure, as it was zoomed in from far away.