Photos

Earlier this morning we had the grand entrance of Queen Mary 2, followed by that of the Queen Elizabeth 2, tonight at 7:00. I missed the arrival of QE2. When I did arrive it was already getting late. There was a crowd of several thousand to “get through” to a spot where I could set up for some photography. It seems everybody in this town had the same idea at the same time. In any case I was able to set up on the Cahill Expressway with several others for this awesome view of the ship and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Overseas Passenger Terminal can’t be seen in this shot. The ship is too large, and is blocking the view.

Workflow was as follows:
The shot(s) you see here are an HDR Merge of 3 separate shots, all taken as Raw at F8 for 1, 2 and 4 seconds respectively. With an HDR you merge the shots then you set the white point based on the composition.
The merge was converted to 16 bit for further work. I had a chance to change the exposure and gamma at this point. I left them as is
I did not apply levels on this one, I was already at the extremes for both highlights and shadow.
I set up a very minor S-curve to provide some contrast in the shot, and I cut green just a tad.
To dull some of the “extraneous” boat activity, and Luna Park, and to lighten up a couple of the darker areas I applied an overlay layer where I used a black and white brush of opacity 5-8 (for dodging and burning). Outside of TE I will probably get rid of the other boats (seen as various coloured streaks across the water).
I cropped and saved the file as a tiff.
For the final post I reduced the image size, applied smart sharpen, and saved as a jpeg.

I think sometimes I should reflect on my work for a day or two before posting. I shot this, did the PP in a bit of a rush then headed off to bed last night. It seemed a little dark but I told myself that's the way it was. Anyway I got a good review that confirmed to me that my first assessment might be correct. I have created a workshop with a lighter view. Let me know what you think.