Sphere building in orange

Yes, I know it’s another photo of the Expo 2017 sphere building in Astana, Kazakhstan. I just took so many of them. I took shots from every view I could get, and they are all blue hour. And if you wonder why, it’s because of a strong rain.

When I arrived to the sphere building, it was not raining, but it was already grey and overcast. So I took few photos and waited. And withing few minutes I had to hide. Even so I got soaked quite a bit. Btw. one thing I always do when I travel, almost regardless where I go and what time of the year it is. I carry a thin jacket against wind and rain. I used it in Italy, I used it in Dubai and I used it in Astana. Always comes in handy.

This is a single shot, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. I also used a part of a second shot just to get rid of a lens flare. You can see how it’s done here.

City center enter of Astana

And back to Astana :) This is a view from quite high up of the center park of Astana. There are actually quite a few parks around the center, which makes the city look really nice. I took a lot of panoramas of this view, but I wanted also one done verticaly.

And this is the one. If you look closely, the part of a roof you can see in the bottom left, is a lower part of the building I was standing on. Actually I wanted a shot where you could see the walls of the building, but it just too distorted in the end, so I let it be. Btw. the cloudy sky is from it raining just minutes before I took this photo.

This is a three shot vertorama, each shot from three exposures. Combined in PTgui, blended in Photoshop.

Fireworks at the bridge

To take a break from all the Astana photos (still have a lot of them :)), how about another shot from the Danube in Flames even from earlier this year. I do like fireworks photos, so this will also add a new one of those to the blog :)

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Very early morning reflection

And this is one of the photos taken before sunrise. Really nice to have a place just for oneself. Too bad that the decorative light were not in the morning. I actually mention that as one of the reasons not to take photos in the morning, in my article ‘Why shoot in the early morning’ here. But of course there are more reasons to do so :)

This is a two shot blend, done in Photoshop. I used the 12mm Laowa lens to get as much of the reflection as I could, as the puddle was quite close to the bridge.

Golden towers

I wanted to go a bit further back here, to get the whole towers in the shot, but I could not. Still, the 12mm Laowa lens captured them almost completely in one photo. There two golden towers are right in the center of Astana and what I know are office building. You could have actually seen them in one of my recent update, to be exact in this photo. They look quite golden and shiny during the day, but at night, with the blue sky reflecting, they look a bit more green, like here.

This is a three shot blend. I had to mostly just correct the very strong light of the Bayterek monument in the middle and a bit of the other yellow light on the buildings. Edited in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop.