Christmas Lights on Parliament Hill - Ottawa, Canada

[Manfred M]

I was out this evening to get a shot of Centre Block of the Canadian Parliament Buildings done up in Christmas lights. It was a dark, cold and cloudy night.






Exposure 3 sec at f/4.5 @ 24mm ISO 100

[NorthernFocus]

Nicely done, Manfred.

[ShaneS]

Next year's Christmas card Manfred? Nice shot

[Rita]

Beautiful.

[Stagecoach]

I'm impressed Manfred, but the clocks wrong

Grahame

[hopeg]

Very nice : )

[Wavelength]

Very lovely; colors against dark back ground makes it very enjoyable

[IzzieK]

With the cold winds and chilly temperatures you Canadians brings to my part of 'burbs, I am not surprised you have that big snowflakes hanging around...

Hey, you might think is summer here at 5:30am, we are hovering at 6 degrees.

[Donald]

...but the clocks wrong

How?

As I said on FB, Manfred, it's a beauty.

[Suzan J]

Very nice. Good to see my tax dollars doing something useful for a change

[Mike Buckley]

Terrific, Manfred! I imagine that you had to address various color balances throughout the image. Considering that your exposure was for 3 seconds, how did you get the flag to appear as it does?

[Brownbear]

Yes, as Donald stated.. It's a beauty!

[Loose Canon]

Very nice Manfred.

Dumb question but are the snowflakes light projections?

[Manfred M]

Terrific, Manfred! I imagine that you had to address various color balances throughout the image. Considering that your exposure was for 3 seconds, how did you get the flag to appear as it does?

I white balanced for the snow and then did some minor luminosity adjustments for the colours. With the "interesting" lighting, I had to make some decisions on how to portray the scene. As for the clear flag; helped by high wind and small image; the shot is not nearly as clear as I would like it at 100%.

[Manfred M]

Very nice Manfred.

Dumb question but are the snowflakes light projections?

Not a dumb question at all; the snowflakes are projections. They do a sound & light show using the Centre Block as the background during the summer, so this is just a minor tweak for the technology.

[Manfred M]

With the cold winds and chilly temperatures you Canadians brings to my part of 'burbs, I am not surprised you have that big snowflakes hanging around...

Hey, you might think is summer here at 5:30am, we are hovering at 6 degrees.

The winter so far has been rather cold and snowy. We usually get about 2.4m (95 inches) of snow over the winter (it can start as early as late October and go well into April; we have received almost half that amount already. The record is 4.4m (173 inches) and that was set back in 1970 - 71, but we came close to breaking it in 2008.

Ottawa is also the second coldest capital city in the world; only Ulan Bator, in Mongolia gets it worse than we do...

[Cantab]

Wow! Was this picture before the recent freezing rain? Maybe the freezing rain froze the flag after the wind blew it straight?

[Manfred M]

I also shot this scene as a pano (5 shots). I would have preferred to go wider, but the West Block is under construction and I cropped the image on the left side just where one can see the very Christmas-like dumpster sitting there.

I'm not as happy with this shot. I should have taken it with the f/2.8 14-24mm lens, rather than the f/2.8 24-70mm one. In order to get in the top of the Peace Tower, from my vantage point, I had to slightly slope up the camera and that resulted in a bit of a noticeable skew in the image. I spent some considerable time with the warp tool to get the roof-line and bottom of the building straight (well more or less straight). The shot was taken with the same camera settings as the previous post.



The two large black boxes between the central Peace Tower and the two smaller tower-like structures are the projectors that produce the large snowflakes on the building.

[Bobobird]

Simple - I like it.