Sunset in Seattle

coscorrosa

Danny Seidman mentioned an interesting idea to me while we were at Kerry Park the other day, taking one exposure at sunset when the sky was at peak, and another after sunset when the lights on the building are at peak, and then merging the two exposures together. He got the technique via dgrin's very own Mahesh

So here's my first attempt at it. This was cropped to a pano to make the composition more interesting and to remove the sky which was pretty featureless above the skyline.

eoren1

Hey Ron,
That is a great idea and you did a good job executing it. My only nit is that the space needle seems too bright/white in that setting if that makes sense. Thanks for sharing the idea of the two exposures!
E

Awais Yaqub

Great job and great Idea !

thapamd

coscorrosa wrote:

Danny Seidman mentioned an interesting idea to me while we were at Kerry Park the other day, taking one exposure at sunset when the sky was at peak, and another after sunset when the lights on the building are at peak, and then merging the two exposures together. He got the technique via dgrin's very own Mahesh

So here's my first attempt at it. This was cropped to a pano to make the composition more interesting and to remove the sky which was pretty featureless above the skyline.

Very nice! I love the pink tones and the soft light. Personally, I think the Space Needle looks "just right." The technique works really well, huh? I remember first writing an article/tutorial about it 8 years ago. I can't believe it's been that long!

coscorrosa

thapamd wrote:

Very nice! I love the pink tones and the soft light. Personally, I think the Space Needle looks "just right." The technique works really well, huh? I remember first writing an article/tutorial about it 8 years ago. I can't believe it's been that long!

Wow, that is a long time, before I had a camera! It is a cool technique though, and really useful. I usually think of cityscapes as having two peaks, one at sunset, and another with the lights on the buildings, this way I can merge to two peaks together

Thanks for the comments everyone!

dlplumer

Very cool technique. Great skyline capture.

Since I do not use PS, I guess I can't try this. I wonder if it would work using Photomattix?

coscorrosa

dlplumer wrote:

Very cool technique. Great skyline capture.

Since I do not use PS, I guess I can't try this. I wonder if it would work using Photomattix?

Probably not very well. You might want to try Gimp, I used to use that on Linux back in the day (7 years ago) and it has layers and blending and masks, and that's all you really need to do the merging.

dseidman

This is definitely a fun technique to try out. It looks like you did a good job but I think you might have been right about needing to wait just a little longer for the building lights to be more visible. The glow on the buildings is very cool though.