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Jorge Canelas's picture

Lisbon Oceanarium

Hi there,

Greatings from Portugal, what do you think about this photo? No HDR, no blendig, just one simple RAW shot .

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5 Comments

i like it, but it seems that the image is "falling" to the right...
;-)

Rui, I suspect the camera was horizontal but we have two things both creating that illusion. 1, The camera is tilting down, slightly, and so the verticals are converging. We see this more often with shots of tall buildings where the camera tilts up and the roof is further from the lens than the floor. So the roof appears smaller and therefore the adjoining walls have to slope in to the roof so they join floor to roof. Here is the same effect but inverted because it has been shot with a down tilt. Here we have all verticals to the right of the centre slope one way and those rather less obvious verticals on the left slope the other way. Look at the pylon just left of centre.

2 We imagine horizons are horizontal. becasue true horizons are. However, in a scene where the horizon is not true then this can play tricks on us. Here we have two manmade horizons, likely at 90 degrees to each other, certainly not in line with each other. We have one horizon to the left of the building and a totally different one to the right. Perspective is casuing the effect you describe.

At first glance, this is a great image. Having the horizon exactly on the centre line would have been better as it would have perfectly matched the sky to the reflected sky and it would have kept the veticals totally perpendicular. Obviously, having the horozon almost in the middle has almost matched the sky and almost made the verticals true, but not quite. The reflected sky looks odd, after looking for a few secoonds. Reflections are always darker than the thing being reflected, due to light loss. However, here, this is not the case. This is particularly obvious to the right of the building, where the reflection of the bright spot in the sky is much brighter than the sky it reflects and there are other strange things going on with the reflection, like the building has gone green. Suggesting you used a warm grad filter on the sky, which of course, did not have its effect reflecting in the water. Or possibly lots of Photoshop work has been done and it has not really worked. I think you used a coral/tobacco grad filter and this does not work because of the reflection. A warm filter that covered the whole lens would have worked or a change of white balance but not a graduated filter. I am not convinced but the scene was obviously beautiful. The long exposure effect on the sky works well. My main problem with it is the strange water/reflection, which is very odd and the more I look the more disturbing it is getting.

I like this image. It has a nice impact and grabs your attention right away.

I agree with Ian on this. At first glance I really liked this but then I noticed the really bright spot dead center of the image and my eye is drawn to that rather than the main subject. I like the sky a lot and the building is really interesting. I cant help thinking that if the building itself was more prominent it would be a stronger photo. Seeing as the roof (from this angle anyway) forms a triangle (and looking more closely at the water line, that shape is the same at the water line), maybe making a feature of that kind of reverse vanishing point could possibly make this a really strong image.