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Ivan Zalesskiy's picture

Looking for a critique

Hello everybody!

I used to shoot jpeg wildlife/macro-ish almost my entire photography life and just recently got into RAW and landscape/cityscape shooting.

This is my most recent shot of Mtsheta in the country of Georgia. It's a time blending of an early blue hour with a late blue hour + a series of 30-second exposures to capture light trails.

I would be very grateful to hear the input of more experienced photographers of what could have been done better in terms of post-processing as well as composition.

Also, this is my first post on Fstoppers, really glad to become a part of the community.
Thank you in advance guys!

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4 Comments

not sure what is going on but it looks a bit hazy and as i can see it is winter/fall so humidity shouldn't be an issue other than that it is a great attempt i could only suggest bracketing to pull out those darker sections and make the lights and car trails stand out a bit more. how much post processing did you do to this?

Hey Joseph! Thank you for your comment, I really appreciate the feedback! I agree it does look a bit hazy, especially in the distance. It was kind of like that that day. Bracketing is a great suggestion, I actually did bracket, but when I added the city lights to the blue hour it looked too unnatural, so I pulled the shadows way down. Perhaps I went too far with this adjustment.

Regarding the amount of post-processing, I am attaching a screenshot of what the photo looked like almost straight out of camera ( with minimal lightroom adjustments applied ). This is the base exposure I used for the foreground. I was trying to expose to the right as my sony a 77 gets quite noisy when I raise the shadows.

What iso are you shooting at not sure why you would have noise lifting shadows

ISO 100. Sony a77 was the first in the world 24-megapixel APC-sensor and it also has sony's now omitted semi-translucent mirror technology which blocks about 1/3 of all light coming into the camera if I am not mistaken. At the time they probably couldn't squeeze in this much resolution without making the sensor a bit more noisy than average.