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Bangkok 2017



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Haven't been in Bangkok for a couple of years since about a month ago. It changing so fast, but it's also still the same. This panorama I shot squeezi...
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Haven't been in Bangkok for a couple of years since about a month ago. It changing so fast, but it's also still the same. This panorama I shot squeezing my camera out of my hotel window which could be opened just a tiny bit. I reassembled my tripod into a pretty scary construction to get the tripod head and camera through that slit and outside the window. Don't try this at home! But then again... at home you might have a balcony :-)
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4 Comments | Report
FredericMONIN Platinum
 
FredericMONIN June 03, 2017
Great cityscape !!!
Witmar
 
Witmar June 03, 2017
great picture
pkasprzycka Platinum
 
pkasprzycka June 12, 2017
love it!
please join the challenge: https://viewbug.com/challenge/your-best-city-long-exposure-photo-challenge-by-pkasprzycka
RamonZabala PRO+
 
RamonZabala October 28, 2018
Amazing night photo !!! Clap , clap
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Behind The Lens

Location

This panorama I shot squeezing my camera out of my hotel window which could be opened just a tiny bit. I reassembled my tripod into a pretty scary construction to get the tripod head and camera through that slit and outside the window. Don't try this at home!

Time

This was shot during my absolute favorite time of day, at the end of the blue hour when the sky is still blue and not totally black (or brown in the case of Bangkok) but it's already late enough so that all the city lights are on.

Lighting

As always: Only available light, tripod, and long exposure to sample enough photons - 25 seconds in this case. You might wonder why in a 25 seconds long exposure you can still clearly see the cars (and not only light streaks). Simple answer: This is Bangkok.

Equipment

I am a wide angle junkie. The wider, the better. This was done using the absolut widest full-frame rectangular lens available on the market, the 10 mm Voigtlander Hyperwide, mounted on my Sony A7RII - in Portrait-orientation! So what you see from top to bottom is the range of this lens. And then I used this extreme wide-angle lens to shoot a panorama to get an even wider field of view from left to right.

Inspiration

I've know Bangkok for many years and I have shot it's skyline from further away many times over the years. This time, I wanted to be right in the center of the action. So I particularly chose my hotel to be right in the heart of the city but to still have enough open space (and not just the wall of the next skyscraper) in front of my room to get a decent photo. It's not easy to shoot the skyline when you are INSIDE that skyline.

Editing

My post-processing workflow is all about quality and quite involved - especially for such a panorama. Starting out with the best possible raw files I used DxO to convert the files into another raw format (.dng) using DxO's very good and gentle noise reduction, sharpening and my own custom made lens profile for the Voigtländer 10mm on the Sony A7RII. Then I open all the .dng files in Lightroom and do 90% of the post-processing there, completely nondestructive, everything still in raw, and still working on the individual files - nothing merged to a panorama yet. I know, Lightroom has a panorama-function, but it is very basic and gives me not enough control. Merging those 10mm ultra-wide frames is totally out of its league. See how straight all the skyscrapers are? Good luck trying that with Lightroom (or Photoshop for that matter). So what I do is synchronize all my Lightroom-edits between the individual dng-files, then export them as 16 bit .tif. And those .tif files I merge to a panorama with a specialized panorama-software called PTGui. Finally I open that panorama in Photoshop as a 16 bit .tif for some final touches (like a slight Orton effect, some filters from Nik and Topaz, etc.). Then I save this 16 bit .tif and add it to my Lightroom library. Never, ever do I convert to jpg. A jpg file has only 8 bit of information-depth as compared to the 14 bit I started out with in raw. That is only a tiny fraction, namely 1/64th (or 1.56%) of the information I gathered with the camera (64 is 2 to the power of 6, and 6=14-8 is the difference in bit-depth between raw and jpg)! Therefore I do not consider jpgs as a decent photo format worth having in my library. The only time I touch jpg is when I export something to upload to the web.

In my camera bag

For over 30 years I have always used Nikon equipment, in the end the mighty D800 and later a D810, the classic Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens and the Nikon 85mm f/1.8 lens, a Nikon D750 and the Nikon 70-200 f/4. But since about 2 years I have sold all this and changed to Sony mirrorless and never looked back. I now have the Sony A7RII and the Sony A7II as cameras, the Sony-Zeiss 16-35 f/4 and 55 f/1.8 lens, the Sony 28 f/2, the 85 f 1.8 and the 70-200 f/4 FE-lenses, and my beloved Voigtlaender 10mm f/5.6 VM.

Feedback

Be careful to never convert to jpg in any step of your workflow. If you do, you throw away over 98% of the information in your raw file and from that moment onward you work with less than 1.6% of your data! And for those jpg-shooters out there (like, e.g. Ken Rockwell): You have done that already in the first step of your workflow, i.e. when you shot the picture. Congratulations ;-)

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