Just in time before they took the Christmas decorations down around Liverpool, the William Brown Library at night. I previously shot this building from almost the same angle last year. I used HDR to add extra punch to the shot. For this I also used HDR. Not to add extra punch but to correct exposure issues. Its quite tricky trying to capture bright lights, dim lights and dark areas nicely at night. I produced 3 16bit TIFF’s from a single RAW to tweak the image and produce a more balanced exposure. I turned off most of the HDR options I normally use as its not what I wanted. Then I ran a black and white action to convert it nicely. HDR and BW is often very nice. The sky was very noisy and I spent ages trying to fix that, but it just looked wrong. It was too smooth. So I just put a gradient layer over it to darken the sky. This was the end result. I don’t often do night shots as there’s no sky and the lighting just isn’t as nice as daytime. I prefer sunset / sunrise with HDR to capture great buildings with dramatic skies. Hard to do that at night. Fireworks tonight in Liverpool. I was able to get close to the building they’re being launched from while they were testing the lights too. So that takes some of the pressure off trying to capture that as well as the fireworks. Should be good.

Model: Canon 30D // Exposure Program: Aperture Priority // ISO speed: 200 // Shutter Speed: 15 // Aperture: f22.0 // Exposure Bias: -1.0 // Metering: Average // Flash: OFF // Focal Length: 10.0mm // Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6