Santa Maria del Fiore
Aug, 2014Views
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Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Behind The Lens
Location
This picture of Santa Maria del Fiore was taken from Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence.Time
Around 9:00pm, in the "blue hour".Lighting
The "blue hour" is usually the best for capturing night urban landscapes since you have an equilibrium between the intensity of city lighting and the sky.Equipment
A Nikon D90 with the 18-105 Kit lens. Obviously, a STURDY tripod is mandatory for this kind of photography. When i shoot the photo it was pretty windy (you can see it in the clouds) and I had to trash lots of files because of blur caused by the cheap tripod used at the time. You don't want to download the photo on the computer to find out that your best shot was actually all blurred, do you?Inspiration
I've been inspired when I saw the view in an old photo book about Tuscany, and I thought that the view would have been really good by night... and so it was!Editing
There is no particular post processing applied to this image, just Raw conversion with Adobe Camera Raw (that is identical to Lightroom) and basic tone/curves adjustment in Photoshop.In my camera bag
A Nikon D90, with a 18-105 lens (not the best lens ever but it's extremely handy, expecially while travelling) and a 50mm f1.8G (that has incredible image qualità for the price). I also carry a tripod, a polarizer, 3 different ND (8x, 64x, 1000x) and the cheap IR remote that saves you lots of time while shooting with the tripod.Feedback
Managing the time to shoot in the blue hour can be tricky, expecially if you are travelling and maybe you wanted to enjoy a dinner in a restaurant... You only have a limited amount of time (less than one hour, with about 20 minutes of "perfect" light) so if you start eating at 8pm you will surely miss the moment! Another problem that can occour when you travel and you have to shoot in the blue hour is that differnet locations in the same city can be too far to reach in time, so plan in advance what you want to shoot, expecially if you will stay in the same place only for a day or two.
