Moscow City on blue hour. Ok, this is not the best photo ever, but it has personal meaning, because that's the first ever shot like this I ever took. First ever intentional architecture shot, if you can say so. Obviously heavily inspired by Elia Locardi's work.
It was quite challenging both on location and on post. When I was shooting it, I planned the exact location beforehand on the computer, knowing my widest lens is 28mm I had really limited options on the composition. It was a warm autumn day. I went there, setup a tripod and started waiting for the blue hour. When the sun set the freezing heavy wind suddenly started to blow, rocking my tripod and freezing myself. And I was standing there doing 30 seconds of exposure, than 30 seconds of waiting for img to process, change shutter and repeat - tens of times. While waiting out the heavy wind gasps so that image would not end up blurry.
BUT there's more! That spiral building has an animation on the LEDs. Most of the time it was showing an ugly blue-red-white colored logo on its sides. So I had to wait extra couple minutes for the right animation sequence before EACH exposure. Took me hour and a half overall and I did not feel my hands or legs after.
On the post production side of things the most challenging to me was equalizing the exposure of all the signs in the scene. You would not believe how much brighter the top right logo is. It's solid 4 steps of exposure difference - giving massive haloing in the kit lens. I forgot...the logo was also moving quite fast!
Took me another 20+ hours of post production I guess.
But that masochistic experience is what led me into photography!
Shot on a7ii with the kit 28-70mm lens. Combined multiple exposures from 1/10 to 30 seconds.
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really nice work! I appreciate you explaining all the work that went into it. I guess now I know why the long exposure images of cityscapes I took in the past never looked that good -- I didn´t take multiple exposures. thanks!4
That's the best thing you could do in post in my small experience! Without it, every light I got was just white ball of light and you could not see or read a single logo anywhere
Try it!
I definitely will -- as soon as I get some place with a proper skyline again!
It was a long story about this photograph and I really liked it! I voted up your image because the city looks inviting against the cold blue background. It was also nice that you chose not to place the group of high-rise buildings exactly in the middle of the frame. I have never been to Moscow, it is surely a city that has changed shape a lot in recent years. In Saint Petersburg and Viborg I have been, very beautiful cities!
Thanks!
The geometry of the river and my lens options at that time actually dictated that composition more than my artistic taste, to be honest =)
I will definitely iterate on this image someday, when there's good enough weather here - and I will try to shoot the central composition closer and wider - it might be better in the end.
As for Moscow itself - in my opinion there's really not much to see here. Those couple of buildings are the only thing that resembles modern times. Everything else is quite gray and dull - which is an aesthetic on its own i guess.
St. Petersburg is great though! Except the weather factor =D