cold dead fall

Hi Joseph!

I, too, have a feeling like "there's nothing to shoot there right now", especially when the weather is just flat, dull and uninteresting (no wind, no fog, no rain - just grey, flat light), so I think that finding yourself another genre to practice can be very beneficial to creative flow and technique mastery.

Regarding your pictures - there are few things that I’d like to point your attention to: colors, tonal range, vertical lines & reflections. As a bonus I’d like to mention possible ways to remove unwanted things in a shot (like blown out highlights from car lights). :)

The color: one of the best time to photograph cityscapes is a blue hour. Mostly because of complementary colors - blue (from the sky) and yellow(-ish) from city lights. They make great combination together. Your second (vertical) shot work very well in this regard. The first one, not so much, and this is because of two reasons: it’s too late (it’s already fully dark) and it’s cloudy (which causes clouds to work like canopy and reflect city lights back, giving them a yellowish color cast). Try shooting with less clouds in the sky (then in the first shot) - even clear blue sky will work with this kind of shots. And secondly - shoot little earlier than the first one. Your camera will see color in the sky longer than your eyes, but eventually the sky will turn full black (usually around astronomical twilight) and it’s time to go for a cup of tea. ;)

Tonal range: I think you did blend exposures with this two images (as most highlights are not blown out) but some of them could be exposed lower, to maintain more details (like the clock tower in a vertical shot). The tower becomes a focus point (thanks to composition) but the clock renders as a yellow color patch (with a faint suggestion of a handles). On the other hand - a PSFS sign rendered very well - try to find an exposure that you could use for the tower clock and mask it in. If you didn’t shoot different exposure that day - well, there’s another reason to shoot it again. ;)

Vertical lines - cityscapes are quite challenging, since lens have their ways of perspective distorting, and lines that are not straight (and we know they should be) are dead giveaway. You can see it especially in vertical shot, where all buildings are leaning to the right. In this case solution is pretty simple - just rotate and/or skew image slightly using free transform tool (in Photoshop) or the Transform section (in Lightroom). Photoshop has rulers, which helps little bit with this kind of tasks.

Reflections - as an old and wise saying goes: every time when someone cuts the reflection, a kitten dies. And I agree. ;) For me, this lack of symmetry with this kind of shot is very unsettling, but I understand it can be no big deal for others. I just prefer to have all of them. If I can’t have both, I’ll cut the building instead or do panorama (with my camera in vertical position, to have more reach from top to bottom).

Small bonus - I can see that in the vertical shot some cars stood long enough during the exposure to blow out lights to pure white. I can also see that you tried to mitigate it, but if something is pure white, darkening makes it only grey. There are no details to recover. That leaves you with three options: leave it, clone it out, mask it in from different exposure, where the car moved to different location or even out of the frame. Two latter option will most probably require Photoshop to perform. Lightroom’s spot removal tool won’t cut it here.

To summarize:

What I like in first image: composition, concept of cityscape reflecting in water, use of highlight stars (in the lamps - small aperture), overall tonal blend and contrast.

What I would do differently: timing (color), framing, weather ;)

What I like in second image: colors, overall composition, most of the highlights.

What I would change in second image: straight lines, recovered highlights, cloned out / replaced blown out car lights, slightly increased contrast, camera moved slightly to the left so the guy on the horse would have only one building as a background to stand out more.

Phew… Hope you won’t fall asleep reading all that. ;) Keep on shooting - you’re having really nice images there. :)