Pic of the Week - Page 86
Pierhead Building
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Location: the Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay, Wales. In the U.S. it’s traditional to celebrate the countdown to midnight watching the Times Square clock in New York. In the U.K. people gather to watch Big Ben in London strike midnight. This clock on the Pierhead Building is unofficially known as the "Big Ben of Wales" and being Welsh, I think this is an appropriate image with which to wish you a great 2011!
This image was captured about 6.45pm using a tripod-mounted Canon 5DmkII camera with a Canon EF 24~105mm F/4L IS lens set at 73mm. I used Liveview and 10x magnification to manually focus on the near shore. The camera was set to manual exposure mode, f/8, ISO 800, and daylight white balance. I then captured a series of 12 exposures from 30 seconds all the way to 1/60th of a second in one-stop increments. The RAW processing, creating and saving the HDRI was all done in Photoshop CS/5. The HDRI was then opened and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro before the final clean-up, black and white conversion, toning and enhancement work was done back in Photoshop. The original HDRI sky was poor because of a strong halo around the buildings, so this sky is from just one image in the set. After adjusting the RAW converter settings until the sky looked good and matched the colour, I then clicked Open Image. With the two images open in Photoshop, the next step was to drag the sky image and overlay it onto the HDRI with a layer mask and a gradient to define the split between the images. A little bit of hand painting on the mask then finished it. Click here to learn something new ... take part in a HDR workshop - Photography Workshops on the Isle of Wight - |