Parliament Hill - Time blend

[Manfred M]

This image is a blend of four different images taken from the beginning to the end of "Golden Hour" and features the back of the Canadian Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, Canada. Evening Golden Hour started at around 7:50 PM and ended at around 9:00 PM. The four images were blended to show off the best of the lighting over that period.

[Shadowman]

Nicely captured.

[Stagecoach]

Interesting concept Manfred and it's worked well.

I have a new sports stadium I want to photograph so it's given me an idea of something I could try.

[Wavelength]

Excellent image

[DanK]

A very striking image. I vaguely recall that you posted the technique some time ago. Do you have a link to that thread?


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[mugge]

Love it.
Cheers Ole

[rpcrowe]

Great image... I love images that are "made" by the photographer not simply "taken"

[Wavelength]

Do you have another one where foreground has just expanses of the river and without those trees on this shore?

[Donald]

Were the exposure settings the same in each of the images used in the blend?

Fascinating idea - to let nature take care of the lighting in this way and you create an image from the best it has to offer.

[george013]

Manfred,
When I remember well you did this before.
Can you tell us how you merged them? And from what?

George

[Manfred M]

Do you have another one where foreground has just expanses of the river and without those trees on this shore?

Unfortunately, for this particular vantage point, that is not possible. I'm shooting from the top of a fairly steep hill and the trees and shrubs are there to protect against soil erosion. There is a very busy road leading to a bridge across the Ottawa River just below the trees. In this shot I cloned out some of the street lighting.

This is a screen shot that shows where I was standing and the broad orange line is the direction of the light at sunset.

[Manfred M]

The technique itself is fairly easy, but one needs a very steady tripod and head (I weight mine down with my camera bag) and a remote camera release so that you can take shots without touching the camera setup. If anyone touches the camera or the tripod head sags, then it's time to pack up and try again some other time. All of the shots need to line up perfectly in PP.

I usually start shooting just before the start of "golden hour" and tend to shoot well into "blue hour", especially if the subject is lit up or the scene has lots of artificial lighting. I shoot using aperture priority, turn off auto-ISO and auto focus (after focusing of course) and bracket shots -1, 0 and +1 stops. Depending on what is happening, I will sometime manually trigger the shots (more likely to happen closer to the equator where golden hour / blue hour are fairly short) or use an intervalometer (I use a Vello Shutterboss) when the sunset takes a long time. In this sequence I took a single shot every minute for close to an hour, so I ended up with around 60 shots to choose from.

When I got home, I looked at all the images and threw out ones that were not going to work (birds flying in front of the camera and a few where I had a distracting rain drop on the lens). Then I chose the images where I got decent artificial lighting, decent light for the river and the trees and I used two different images for the sky. Four shots went into this image. I have done some with two shots and some with three shots, so it depends on the subject and images that are captured.

I prepared the raw data fairly minimally and tuned everything in Photoshop in separate layers, shown in the attached screen shot. I used layer masks and clipping masks to prepare individual shots for the blend. I use SmartObjects on some of the images where I feel I might need to tweak the filters used in the base image to give me a bit more flexibility in PP.

[DanK]

Manfred,

Very helpful. thanks very much

Dan

[Wavelength]

That gives a clear explanation of the situation; thank you very much, Manfred

[Manfred M]

Were the exposure settings the same in each of the images used in the blend?

Fascinating idea - to let nature take care of the lighting in this way and you create an image from the best it has to offer.

Explained in thread #12. I shoot +1, 0 and -1 bracketed shots using Aperture Priority mode. That not only gets me the "correct" overall exposures, but also provides images where the sky is a bit darker and more interesting and the highlighted areas are a bit brighter for the blends.

[IzzieK]

I like this one better, Manfred -- than the panorama. Nothing wrong, just that this one's scene is more like a fairy tale scene one can make stories thereof.