Downtown Ottawa with the snow covered Rideau Canal

[Manfred M]

There is a very limited window to shoot the Christmas lights in downtown Ottawa, Canada. This year the lights are on from Dec 7 through to Jan 7. I really do prefer to have some ice and snow in the shots, so this places one limitation on when the shots can be take.

The other limitation is that I shoot in a busy downtown area and with it taking me between 15 and 30 minutes to get the series of shots I need to create the final image, most evenings don't work simply because of the number of people around. One person bumping into me or the tripod; even the ground shaking a bit (this shot is taken from a bridge) is enough to ruin the sequence and I have to start over. I have found that Dec 25 (Christmas) and Dec 26 (Boxing Day) are the two days where I can get out and face minimal foot and vehicle traffic.

The downside yesterday is that it was quite overcast, so the sky was not particularly interesting, but it was a relatively balmy -6C / 21F, so I didn't get too cold.

This is a 3-shot pano taken of downtown Ottawa with the snow covered Rideau Canal. About 12 layers in PP work in Photoshop to balance out the colour temperatures, shadows and highlight areas.

[Sailorstu]

Incredible job Manfred!

[Donald]

Superb image.

[Shadowman]

Nicely captured.

[rpcrowe]

Very lovely image...

[Rick50]

Lovely winter scene and also love the colors.

[Manfred M]

Just out of interest: This is the original pano that I worked on. My priority was to get good colours and detail in the highlight areas in order to minimize blowing out the lights. I did three different exposures on the pano in the field to see which one would work out best and I selected the darkest one as it had the best highlights). The shots were done at ISO 64 to maximize dynamic range and minimize noise.






This is a screen shot of the 12 layers (with layer masks) to get the final image. Most of the work was to break the lighting into zones and reduce the colour casts from the mixed lighting. Snow is not green or pink....

There is about a hour's worth of PP work on this image.


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[Wavelength]

Excellent image

[billtils]

Very nice work Manfred, from concept to capture to processing. Thanks for your explanation.