| 04-01-2022, 06:07 PM
City of Colours, Contest #188 entry.
The CBD of Perth is reflected on the calm waters of the Swan River, giving a near-perfect reflection. It is quite rare to see the river this reflective, and it takes a night of no wind and no boat traffic ( with maybe a bit of luck on the tide as well? ) to allow any residual ripples to clear. This was taken in August of last year, where the weather forecast was showing no wind for the night. I got up at 2 o'clock in the morning and headed down to the shoreline at Mill Point, South Perth. Conditions were nearly perfect, and I spent the next few hours happily snapping away at various points on the shoreline and walking away with some fantastic panoramas.
Perhaps the only hiccup were a couple of swans, who had decided to cruise the river at this strange hour. I heard them honking before I saw them in the dark, and even though this river is their namesake and they arguably had more right to be here than me, I was rather annoyed that they were carving up the beautiful reflections in their wake. I packed up, jumped in my car and made my way south down the shoreline to escape their influence, but the feathered fiends followed me and 15 minutes after initially moving I had to pack up again and move even further down the shore to escape their influence. After this happened again 20 minutes later, I gave up and went to a different spot on the river. All-in-all, a very enjoyable night, despite the interruptions!
This shot is both a panorama and a stacked HDR, made up of a total of six individual images. Shot with my Pentax K-1 and Sigma 35mm in landscape orientation, three bracketed shots ( 10 sec - 2 sec - 30 sec ) were merged together in the HDR editor on Affinity Photo into a single exposure, and then those two merged exposures were stitched using the Panorama editor on Affinity.
I was pretty happy with the results, and I was surprised how much colour is there when the highlights are preserved. I don't remember doing much with the colours aside from cooling the White Balance and shifting the Yellow toward Orange before dropping the saturation on both to dampen the effect of the sodium-vapour street lights. Definitely worth getting up early for. Whether or not this fits within the context of an Urban Landscape, I'm not sure; I'll leave that to the Observers to decide.
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