Gotham City | Pittsburgh, PA
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Pictured is Fifth Avenue Place in Pittsburgh, rising above the Roberto Clemente Bridge. You may or may have not seen some awesome images this past summer of this building sporting a bat signal as The Dark Knight Rises was being filmed in the city. This was shot during a predawn photowalk with Dave DiCello and Ben Beard over the Christmas holiday.
I shot this with my Nikkor 50mm lens with a 20 second exposure at f/22. I love the detail and the shape of the flares that this lens is capable of creating. I admittedly don’t use it much, but these cityscapes make for a great time to break it out of the bag.
The Shot: Nikon D90, Nikkor 50mm f1.8 lens. Single exposure, 20 seconds, f/22, ISO 200.
‘Just a Speck in the Universe’
Today’s photo is a little different for me. This isn’t an HDR image, but a single long exposure. I recently took a trip back home to Pennsylvania to visit my family and enjoy some down time. During the trip, as always, I stayed at my grandparent’s house out in the country. The first evening I was there, I noticed just how clear and bright the night sky was. The horizon was pretty clear of light pollution and the sky was free of cloud cover. I got out my tripod and set my camera up. This shot was a 30 second exposure, remote triggered. I haven’t made very many photos of the night sky, but I think that I will do more of it now. It is amazing at how many stars you can’t see with your naked eye that emerge in a long exposure. There is nothing that can make you feel smaller than seeing the sky like this.
There wasn’t a whole lot of post processing on this image. I am used to getting deep into processing with my HDR images, and this was a welcome relief. As I said before, this was a 30 second exposure, remote triggered. I opened the file in Photoshop and tweaked the color a bit to bring out the pink tones that were low on the horizon. I gave the contrast a slight boost with Nik Color Efex Pro and ran the image through an Unsharp Mask in Photoshop. I then masked out the sharpened foreground to return it to it’s original blurred state.
Shot from Elderton, Pennsylvania
Dome Sweet Dome |Pittsburgh’s Penn Station
I’ve been pretty busy since returning to North Carolina from my trip to Pittsburgh, so I’m just now getting around to posting this image to my blog. To those of you who have already seen it on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, 500px and whatever other social media platforms I’m on now (there are so many, it’s easy to lose track), sorry for the repeated posts.
This rotunda is located at Penn Station (originally Union Station) in Pittsburgh, PA. The building was built from 1898-1903 by famed architect Daniel Burnham who also designed Washington DC’s Union Station. The rotunda originally served as a covered area for passengers to wait and for carriages to turn around. In 1912, the station was renamed Penn Station due to its service to the Pennsylvania Railroad.
After years of deterioration, Penn Station was restored in the 1980s. Today, the old railroad hotel is an apartment complex. The station still serves rail traffic via Amtrak as Pennsylvania’s westernmost stop on the Pennsylvanian Route. It remains one of the state’s busiest stations.
This image is a three exposure HDR, shot with a 10.5mm Nikon fisheye lens. Merged in Photomatix, finished in Photoshop and tweaked with Nik Color Efex and Viveza.
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©2011 Zach Frailey, please do not use image without permission.
