Singapore Downtown Core
Another one of the most incredible cities in the world is definitely Singapore. It’s an island and a city. Ultramodern and beautiful. With lots of high-rises yet surprisingly green.
The obvious place to see the whole city from is of course Marina Bay Sands. It’s a great place to have some drinks and do some cityscape photography.
As with other cityscapes the magic appears during the blue hour. Blue hour is when the cold blue ambient light contrasts with the warm artificial city lights. It is when the exposures need to be longer but not too long as to not blow out the highlights.
Blue hour requires finding a balance. Too early and there are not enough city lights. Too late and there is no ambient light.
One useful trick is to take multiple exposures at different shutter speeds. Later during post processing it’s possible to combine them to balance out the blown highlights and recover the dark parts of the image. A sturdy tripod is needed to avoid introducing any camera movements.
Technical information
This image was taken with a 14mm lens. Which is very wide. But you need wide when you are dealing with such a cityscape.
I took multiple exposure in order to recover the highlights. I usually take a few exposures just in case, even if I don’t need them later. Unfortunately I don’t go to these scenic places that often.
I used a ReallyRightStuff clamp. This little thing can be attach to many places. A railing or a protective glass can become your tripod. It’s also very small so it’s handy to have because many places don’t allow tripods.
Post processing
Post processing was done in Lightroom and later in Photoshop. The usual color and exposure balancing. Then in Photoshop I recovered some of the highlights from a different frame.
The biggest adjustment was straightening the vertical lines. 14mm is very wide and when photographing buildings there is a lot of perspective distortion. Luckily both Lightroom and Photoshop have good tools to deal with this. But a significant part of the images gets cropped when the perspective is adjusted. It’s good to have this in mind when framing in location.