I went into the city last night and tried my hand at nighttime cityscape photography, pretty pleased with the results, especially since it's my first time trying this. All shots at ISO 100, f22, shot on tripod with remote release. Shutter speeds varied from 45 seconds through to around 2 minutes or so. All but one image taken with Canon's 20-35mm f2.8 L series lens, the other image was take with the Canon 35-80mm f4.5-f5.6 Mark III lens.
Sydney Harbour Bridge from the Milsons Point (Luna Park)
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Another shot, taken near the above location:
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Ferris Wheel at Sydney's Luna Park
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Sydney Harbour Bridge from the North Sydney Olympic Swimming pool
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The Sydney Opera House from the International terminal - using my 35-80mm, zoomed in. I tried a variety of exposures here, but felt this was the best as it didn't blow out the details in the white tiles of the building. Anything longer than this started to blow details. I could probably try some fancy HDR with these series of images...
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Same location as the previous shot, but with the 20-35mm f2.8 and a wider shot. Was tricky, cos lots of ferries were coming into dock at Circular Quay, and quite a few food pedestrians were making their way along here as well.
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City Skyscrapers from the same vantage point as the previous shots:
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Sydney Harbour Bridge from the Opera House side:
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I've done a bit of cloning here to remove tonnes of hot pixels from the images, as well as trying to remove some flare/halos (forgot to take the hood with me). All shots have had slight adjustments to contrast (not more than +4 for any one image) and hue/saturation (a few images I pumped it to +9, but most of them were in the range of +2-3 or so). Some creative sharpening using the smart sharpen tool and LAB mode, as well as some USM on resizing for the web. I've also ran default passes of Neat Image on the images, to help clean up minor noise artificats.
C&C appreciated. I hope you enjoy the images! This will probably be my memories of Sydney, I'm almost certainly moving back to live with my parents due to being unemployed and financial constraints. If I move, I have no intentions of returning to Sydney in the future, it's full of bad memories.
Dave





