Artistic Photography
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the capital of Canada. During my stay in Ottawa, I decided to take photos of the Parliament Hill. I took some pictures during the day and others at night. Weeks later, after editing all the pictures, I found that two of them stood out from the rest.
Ottawa at Night
This picture, in particular, is one that I really like because of the exaggerated colours and its mysterious atmosphere. To take this picture, I needed my DSLR and a tripod. Since this is a long exposure photo, I had to put my camera on the tripod and change the lens’s aperture and the camera’s shutter speed. I had to experiment around with all the settings in order to get a picture that didn’t look too bright or too dark, that the street lights didn’t look too blurry, and that I could get a fair amount of light from the building itself.
This photo was retouched in post-production. I decided that I wanted a more dramatic effect and that this picture allowed me to make those changes. In Photoshop, I made some changes while using the “Camera Raw” filter so that the shadows looked darker and the architectural features of the photo were sharper and more detailed. I also brought the lights a bit down so it would have a stronger contrast and a more impressive effect.
Overall, I am very pleased with the outcome, I think the picture looks eye-catching and powerful.
Ottawa at Noon
In contrast to the picture taken at night, this picture represented a whole different set of challenges. For this photo, I just needed my DSLR; I had to change its settings from the night before in order to adjust them for a daylight setting. This meant closing the lens’s aperture, and increasing the camera’s shutter speed since there was enough light in the day and I didn’t want the pictures to be overexposed.
In this photo, the problem was the people around. As anyone can imagine, since the parliament is a touristic attraction, it is always crowded. This makes it hard to take a picture that looks “clean”. So, instead of “removing them”; I decided to make them part of the photo’s personality by adding them to the composition. I took the picture when I saw that everyone was gathered around in one specific spot which in this case is the centre of the photo. This was really tricky to do and I still couldn’t manage to make it look completely perfect.
Finally, this picture was heavily retouched. Same as the previous photo, this image allowed me to manipulate it into something stylized and even a bit extravagant. I really enjoy giving new and unconventional looks to photos of famous locations.
