The City at Night

[davidc]

Well I've been looking for tall buildings to take photos from in the City to get some interesting night shots/panoramas. Some of you will know that I've heard back from 1 in 10 of the places I inquired about and even the place that did reply ignored me when I tried to set a date!

Anyway, I finally found somewhere! I work on Bishopsgate in a very.... "prominent" building (based on the number of protestors we get outside each day) and although I asked building management if I could go out into the open air section on our 9th floor they said no.

So I ignored them. I tiptoed out on Friday night onto the open air gantry on the 9th floor, stepped over the safety barrier and got as close to the edge of the roof as I dared. It wasn't windy - I'm not THAT reckless - but it was cold and it drained the camera battery awfully quickly. Furthermore, after taking this shot I moved the tripod head back to landscape and it snapped clean off! I ended up taking the rest of my pictures that night with a camera running out of power balanced on top of a traffic cone of all things.

Why a traffic cone was on the 9th floor of a city building I do not know!

So while the image suffers a little because it was cloudy and already dark (wrong time of year for city shots at night) the location itself is very promising indeed and one I intend to sneak back to when conditions improve.

This is very, very mild HDR - took it in RAW then created -1 and +1 versions to get more details in the shadows and tone the highlights down slightly but you can still see the poppy appeal logo on tower 42 (right hand tower) is still rather bright. Unavoidable given the exposure times I think.

iso 100
f8
15sec exposure
24mm


City Night by cedarsphoto, on Flickr

[Nina]

Hi David, good effort cosidering the conditions! I like your vantage point, but I would not be as brave as you. I think you did your own critique here, so I need not add anything much. Perhaps what I would try and do is pull back the highlights if possible in RAW converter. I don't get involved in HDR so I can't comment whether the highlights being overbright is the result of that processing being used.

[davidc]

In this case I looked at the original image and the overblown highlight top right and on some of the windows of Heron Tower in the centre is on the core image, so not an HDR artefact. But I don't think HDR has made it better.

Looking forward to the next time and I'll take a setup shot too

[Mike Farley]

..... I asked building management if I could go out into the open air section on our 9th floor they said no.

Let's hope that your building's management team are not avid readers of this forum.

It's certainly an impressive shot and I look forward to seeing the update. When you do shoot the scene again, I did find the darker buildings at bottom left jarred with the rest of the image and I would be tempted to try a composition with some of the lower part of the image removed.

Accepting that you had problems with your tripod head and I do not know at what point you took this shot, the image does not seem to be quite straight. That can be easily fixed in post processing, although you might want to investigate a spirit level that fits in the hot shoe which will help get it right in camera. This type is good as it operates in both horizontal and vertical axis. With the two way version you have to take it off and reposition it every time you rotate the camera, which gets annoying after a while.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Camera-Hotshoe-Olympus-Panasonic-Cameras/dp/B001MBEPKM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352840562&sr=8-1

Look for one on Amazon or eBay. You can buy it from one of the big boys, but they charge silly money and want in the region of £25.

I still maintain that when shooting city lights in the dark, the exposure to stop the lights being burnt out has to be very short. That is why HDR has not worked in this instance as even the shortest exposure will be too long and the highlights have blown, so HDR has nothing to recover in those areas.