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Shanghai by Night
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Shanghai by Night



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upload_dateJun, 2015

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2 Comments |
jimhelmick
 
jimhelmick June 11, 2015
Nigh makes a city stand out beautifully.
AliAlzuhair
 
AliAlzuhair September 30, 2015
Pretty!

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Tags

#shanghai #night #cityscape #Oriental Pearl #Financial District #china
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Behind The Lens

Location

I took this picture on my first visit to Shanghai. It's taken from the outside observatory in the Oriental Pearl tower, at around 100 meters high.

Time

This was taken later at night, around 11pm.

Lighting

Well, in these big cities, there is usually a lot of light (pollution). Even if after sunset, there’s plenty of awesome lights to be seen. Also, around sunset, the lights inside the buildings aren’t always on yet, so if you want to capture those, it’s sometimes better to wait a bit longer. The skies in these Chinese cities aren't always that clear, but that sometimes works in your advantage with all these city lights reflecting everywhere. In this case, lights were abundant ;).

Equipment

Back then I used a Canon 450D with a Tamron 10-24mm lens. There wasn't any room to use a tripod, instead I used a GorillaPod to attach the camera to the safety nets outside. It was pretty hard to keep it stable with longer shutter speeds and all kinds of people walking around and moving the nets. So hard, in fact, that the pictures on my first try turned out to be unsharp. So I had to go back the next day to try again. Still worth the double entrance fee though!

Inspiration

I was just in awe with Shanghai, since I had never seen so many tall buildings in my life. Back here in The Netherlands everything is low to the ground, so I knew I had to get up one of these high buildings. Back then the Oriental Pearl already wasn't the highest building anymore. There was a higher one, as seen in the picture (shaped like a bottle opener), and I figured taking a picture of that one and its surroundings would be more interesting than going to the top of the bottle opener. So Oriental Pearl it was. The view from the top of this one was pretty awesome (it's around 360 meters high in total, I believe), but at the same time a bit boring, since most of the surrounding buildings are a lot less tall. I also didn't have proper equipment to shoot through the glass, with all the reflections of the lights inside ruining my pictures. So I tried the observatory a lot lower (around 100m level), where you could stay outside. The composition made possible by the wide angle lens was just perfect.

Editing

I did, but nothing spectacular. I used lightroom to fix the white balance, exposure and tried to pop the colors of all the lights a bit. The highlights were a bit overexposed because of the long exposure, so I tried to reduce that a bit. I wasn't really experienced with both photographing and editing yet, so I wonder what I would make of it if I were to do it again. For sure I will do a remake next time I'm in Shanghai!

In my camera bag

Nowadays my canon gear is collecting dust at home. I grew tired of all the weight I was carrying around, especially since I'm more of a holiday photographer and can't bring too much while traveling. Since a few years I switched to Olympus m43 and an assortment of nice and small lenses. At the moment my setup usually is a Olympus E-M1 m2 with a 12-32mm pancake, a 20mm 1.7, a 75mm 1.8 and a laowa 7.5mm. Since I have the laowa, I don't use my Samyang 7.5mm fisheye quite as much.

Feedback

With all these bright lights, highlights will get blown out quite easily while doing long exposures. Try to avoid that, by not making your exposure too long, or maybe underexpose a bit. It's usually easier to bring back details in dark areas than in bright areas, at leas that is my experience with these city lights. If possible, you could also take multiple shorter exposures and combine them in post processing, to still get those long exposure effects. Added bonus is that it can reduce noise considerably with some blending techniques (e.g. in photoshop, with smart objects and stack modes).

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