HOW TO CREATE A MAGICAL IMAGE OF NEW YORK CITY
The thing I love best about a city is the lights! A city at night is a magical thing... the grit and grime gets washed away by the shadow of night and bathed anew in the multi-coloured glow of lights. Alright, I admit - that's a bit pollyanna but you know what I mean right? I was in New York City a while back and couldn't help but snap a bunch of photos of all the lights.
I've been working on this image (which is looking towards the epicenter of lights at Times Square) for a while. It's the result of my attempts to blend photos that are related to create a new image with greater impact. In this case I took several photos of the same thing - 5 focused exposures tone mapped in Photomatix, and 2 out of focus images of the same thing with nice round bokeh of the lights. I played with the with bokeh to get the right intensity on the colours, then created a tilt filter effect on the in-focus HDR layer using Topaz Lens Efex and and finally stacked them up and used the lighten blend mode in photoshop to give the feel of a double exposed image.
If I've lost you now, my apologies - go ahead and skip down to bottom of this post (below the video). BUT if the last paragraph got the wheels spinning in your brain... read on to find out what inspired all this plus a cool how to video.
My new experiment on this New York image was inspired by several things - a love of bokeh lights, tilt shift and double exposed images.
I've been playing around with creating bokeh images for a while now. Between holiday time and the ice storm I've been served lots of opportunities lately to experiment. You might remember images from some of my recent posts - like this one? And this one?
Add to that my recent discovery of takashi kitajima, who's tilt shift, bokeh, city lights photos I find nothing short of captivating. Go ahead - google him, circle him, plus one him or follow him - I'll wait. Just make sure to come back here afterwards. :-)
Then layer on the idea of making "double exposure" images. Yes - I came across some beautiful examples of this recently made by Dylan and Sara Photography and then found their video below of how to do this in camera!
So I got wondering what would happen if I combined all these things I loved. Bokeh, tilt shift and double exposure ideas. My image posted here is a first crack at it. It's not 100% there yet but it's moving in the right direction... it has the right feeling... a little bit magical.
Which is exactly what I wanted - 'cause that's what I love best about cities.
What about you? Do city lights captivate you?
Have you ever tried to blend a few different techniques on a single image? Did it turn out the way you had planned/ hoped?
Go ahead and let me know in the comments below, and have a magical weekend everyone!