[nitewalk] Beauty of Our (Lion) City

[Kit]

This is coming from someone who believes that blending, multiple exposures, HDRs, etc has a place in photography when its absolutely necessary or when one is trying to achieve a particular appearance or feel for his images.

I'd suggest you try and train yourself to study ambient lighting and identify the best timing to take your photos. Requires a lot of patience and observation but results can be rewarding. If you can hit the right note, you'd find that there isn't much to do except for minor tonal, colour adjustments in the processing stage.

Architectural and cityscapes phorography is really about studying your subjects in great detail.

 

[nitewalk]

#49

Another attempt at HDR for a scene which was pretty much a backlit. Realise something not quite right about this shot, so I will redo the processing.

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[nitewalk]

#50

A stormy sunrise yesterday.

 

[nitewalk]

#51

The Reflection at Keppel Bay during the sunset on Sunday. Draken413o and Scintillation were there also but didn't know was them. :sweat:

 

[nitewalk]

#52

Yesterday was a rainy day. It was still raining while I was on my way to Punggol, but it stopped when I reached. Amazed.

 

[nitewalk]

#53

Dover Road.

Single exposure shot with minimal post-processing by using black card technique.

 

[nitewalk]

#54

 

[nitewalk]

#55

Converted the earlier shot to black and white and somehow feel that this is better than the coloured version. The small sub-building on the left breaks the symmetry of the main building but from this angle, I could not compose it in a way that it can be left out entirely to show the symmetry, however symmetry wasn't the most important thing on my mind, the repetition in the design was what caught me.

 

[nitewalk]

#56

Another stormy day with flat colours thus use HDR to boost the colour.

 

[nitewalk]

#57

Part of Human

The exposure was 10 minutes (from stacking ND110 and ND106), than the usual 30 or 50 seconds exposure.

I have never pushed beyond 4 minutes, rarely even hitting 4, but I just got curious and stacked them to see what it was going to give me. In the end, it was the geometry of the structure and what it resembles which interests me.

 

[edutilos-]

#57

Part of Human

Reminded me of something. It is perhaps then quite appropriate that the exposure was 10 minutes (from stacking ND110 and ND106), than the usual 30 or 50 seconds exposure.

That would have been quite, well errm, prematured.

I have never pushed beyond 4 minutes, rarely even hitting 4, but I just got curious and stacked them to see what it was going to give me. In the end, it was the geometry of the structure and what it resembles which interests me.

Nice, I like the lighting here. I was there recently but there was no sun.

 

[nitewalk]

#58

A personal favourite. The execution was rather straight-forward and simple, in fact I merely rotated the ball head to align the lift column and frame the shot, and I metered for the area which was in between the brightest and the darkest part of the whole frame, and did a single exposure where thereafter I converted using channel mixer in Photoshop CS4 with some fine-tuning done to the shadow, midtone and highlight.

In this case, rule of third was deliberately applied (when it is quite clear that I do quite often use 50-50 for the cityscapes especially MBS and Shenton Way shots) to frame the lift column in the left third to allow the diagonal lines to converge towards the left third and also the diagonals are allowed to dominate the frame. Perhaps I can also frame it in a way that I allow the "horizontals" (speaking in a sense of the lines on the left being relatively horizontal compared to those on the right) to dominate and leaving one third of the frame for the diagonals, if I frame the lift column in the right third. However, I feel that will be less dynamic than this composition.

 

[Weiwu Lah]

Beautiful series! Jiayou!

 

[nitewalk]

#59

It is more like 7 photos a weekend then a photo a day on weekdays. Really finding it impossible to shoot on weekdays due to work.

Another single exposure shot. This time the lift column is not placed on the third, just off-centre placement.

Another mind-boggling shot of lines. It makes me wonder whether it was a deliberate intent to play with our eyes by the architect. As a student, I hated geometry. This week it is all about geometry, weekday at work, weekend shooting, geometry geometry geometry, lines lines lines, shapes shapes shapes.

My love-hate relationship with geometry. Here is another to play with your mind. By the way, if you face insomnia, scroll up and down furiously while staring at the lines. :bsmilie:

 

[Kit]

Try to be there earlier in the evening, about 4pm. If you do get sunlight, the sun will hit the courtyard at an angle. Parts of the building will be in shadow and parts will be expposed to the sun. You might get quite interesting results.

I was there 5 years ago. At that time, I couldn't access to the upper floors as they were under renovation.The NTUC still there?

taman jurong | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
taman jurong +wings+ | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

 

[Kit]

The NTUC occupied the 2 storey building in the middle of the courtyard. Its quite an interesting piece of architecture really.

 

[nitewalk]

#60

 

[nitewalk]

#61

Sharing a shot I made a month ago, to break the monotone of the lines and lines and lines. This is a single exposure shot, done just before the sun get way too harsh. Minor adjustment done, mostly in cropping.

However, I will revisit this place some time soon. I am guessing that sunset would be a better time to photograph this building.

 

[Kit]

Ah. That one is NTUC ah. I by passed the building when I went up on the lift nearest to me and came down by the lift in the other side. Anyway, I used it as an anchor in the foreground in another shot. It is the next photo which I will be sharing (Edit: *below* #60).

BTW I just bought the two books by about Julius Shulman. Must say it is quite inspiring what he could do with his vision back then, which I can't on a modern camera.

Shulman was always an inspiration. He was still taking photos at 95! I searched high and low for those 2 books. Didn't know they were easily available on Amazon.

 

[nitewalk]

#62

Back to Geometry. I can't remember whether this was single or multiple exposure. Did minor adjustment in the curves that is all. The workflow was quite short.