Thursday, March 23, 2006

Final shots of Halifax at night

Here are the remainder of the shots that I took of Halifax at night. They represent different views, with different building compositions, light and reflected light.

Casino

This is the Halifax casino. I used the 100-300 telephoto lens to focus on the building and the reflections. I tried cropping the image to remove the sky but the photo becomes too much for the eye.






Waterfront and Citadel

I shot this photo because I really liked the two beams of strong blue light. The building composition was interesting too. Again I used the 300m telephoto.







The Citadel

I centered this shot on the Citadel and love the almost pastel colours of reflected light. The buildings of the waterfront create some scale against the tall background buildings.







Panoramic





Dancing lights

This photo turned out better than I expected because when shooting I didn't notice the two layers of light. They look like dancing lights similar to the Northern Lights.








5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice work. I like the Dancing Lights and Panoramic best, although the Panoramic has two very bright lights close together near the middle that distract the eye. Also, it's a little dark overall, and the buildings a little too distant (like the critique of my Deal Town shots) to be as effective. The bridge is good - nice reflections and a nice composition. Your 300mm lens (which on the 350D is like a 450mm lens unless its an EF-S lens) is good for getting in close.

Anonymous said...

I also meant to ask - what ISO were you using, and what metering mode (matrix, evaluative or centre-weighted)? Was it RAW of jpeg format?

Critical Light said...

Ivan,

Yes, I just got some shots back from the printer and they do look a little dark. So I might have to play with that a little more. I only took one panoramic shot for the reason that you can't see enough and those bright lights are distracting. I think I will scrap that but the reason why I wanted it is, the company that has asked me to produce prints of Halifax has some buildings in the far right of the picture. The buildings are in front of the dockyard so if you zoom in it looks messy. But if you zoom out, you lose the buildings even though you have the intersting skyline of downtown. I tried another approach and that is shooting from the bridge down a street where the three buildings are. They will be posted soon for your expert critique.

I always shoot RAW in Adobe RGB. The metering mode was set to evaluative. And the ISO was 100. Actually, now that you mention that I did play with the ISO but have forgotten to look at the results. Mmmm.

Anonymous said...

If you are going to more and more do stuff for exhibition or sale, I'd recommend getting a monitor profile done. Your printers may be able to do one for you, that ties in your monitor to their ink/paper set up, so you get as close to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). Pros do this. You can do it yourself, with a device called a Spyder, but if you are not working with your own home printer, I'd work with the print shop and get a (hopefully free) profile for your current set up. Means you don't waste money, and if you do it through a print shop that you get your prints from, then they will either do it for free, or charge v little. I've been toying with this for a while.

Critical Light said...

A while back I did a little complaining at the photo store about the prints they were making. They gave me a colour card (basically a card with various colours and photos on it) and the same card on file. I used that to adjust the output of my screen. It was a pretty basic adjustment but most of the time, what I see on my screen is what I have in hand. Except in this case, where the photos look a little darker.

I have been thinking about a proper screen calibration for a while but putting it off. I am very close to buying my own printer but still having difficulty trying to decide to go Epson or Canon. Lots of people have been raving about this Canon i9900; and I can print up to 13 by 19 prints which is great for me. But lots of photographers seem to go with the Epson. I hope to make this decision soon.

Dams