The Ever Changing Colours of the Perth City Skyline - 1 - Dave Catley

Afternoon City Glow, Perth City Skyline, Western Australia

We live in one of the cleanest & most beautiful cities in the world here in Perth and we think it’s time to showcase just how amazing the Perth City Skyline is.

We are currently in the enviable position of having access to a flat on Millpoint Road in South Perth with stunning views of the Perth City Skyline throughout the day. It never ceases to amaze me how much the colour & quality of light changes as the hours and days go by.

In this series of posts I’ll be showcasing unique images of the Perth City Skyline in all it’s glory and variety.

Afternoon City Glow, Perth City Skyline, Western Australia – Lightroom

This first image was taken last week just before sunset. There were plenty of clouds in the sky with many gaps through which the sun streamed as it approached the horizon.

I had my camera mounted on a tripod oriented vertically with my 70-200mm lens set to 70mm. The plan was to take a series of images and stitch them together in Lightroom to make a very high resolution image, it turned out to be 35MP in this instance. I set my camera up to take 3 bracketed images for each shot as the dynamic range looked liked a potential problem. Ironically I ended up only using the first image from each set, the dynamic range of modern camera’s has come a long way but it never hurts to be safe 🙂

Blowup of Elizabeth Quay from the Final 35MP Image to Show the Detail

To the West of the city the golden sun was filtered through the clouds providing a surreal golden glow that slowly faded towards the East into the cooler blue tones. The difference from one side to the other was enormous and simply breathtaking.

Afternoon City Glow, Perth City Skyline, Western Australia – Original

Replicating such an effect can be very tricky in Post Processing, what starts out as a living atmospheric glow as light bounces of particles in the air all around you simply becomes a flat dull haze when the image is first loaded into Lightroom. You can see from the original image above there there was not a lot of “magic” to it at all.

As always Lightroom did a great job of the initial processing which I then transferred to ON1 Photo Raw to add some effects and then into Photoshop for some final touches and to create my “Master File” for this image.

Afternoon City Glow, Perth City Skyline, Western Australia – ON1 Photo RAW

Image Details

Location: Perth City from South Perth
Date: 4th July 2017
Time: 5:32pm
No. of Images Stitched: 7
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mk11
Lens: EF 70-200mm f/4L IS USM
Camera Mode: Manual
Exposure: 1/25 sec at f11

Post Processing

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