That first night shot

Untouched. You saw this in  Monday's blog. What you didn't completely get was how gobsmacked I was after following the process. It's night, set the ISO that way. Open aperture all the way. I just guessed at exposure settings. Then to get this image out of the camera!

Yes, there is stuff wrong with it. Note the slight tilt of the buildings. The trees along the river are kind of murky, and the the clouds are blah. I'd like it if the reflections in the water were sharper. But as a first attempt at a night long exposure! Wow!

After a few Lightroom tweaks.

A few seconds in Lightroom have cleared up those issues, along with a few other tiny tweaks, and I've cropped it a bit. I think it looks much nicer.

I'm hardly an expert with the tool. These are very basic adjustments, and an expert might do things quite differently and achieve quite different results.

Here's another tweak, with a slightly longer exposure, and somewhat different cropping and adjustment choices. Note the bright lobby windows are a slightly different shade of yellow, though I may have brightened it slightly too much. The vertical brown strip off to the left seems a bit clearer. I think the photo over all is a bit crisper and brighter, at least that was the intent.

One could do this all day. At the moment, I like this one best. The future me after learning more about composition and Lightroom tweaks might gag and hide my face.

I'm taking a break from swimming this week. I'm doing the MEC half marathon race on Saturday, so this is taper. Plus parking overall is brutal the later it gets in the day during Stampede. I had a short clunky feeling run on Monday, 5K 33 minutes. Oddly enough, the fastest K was the first one, when I was feeling most clunky. Then I slowed down. No surprise.

I'll do another short easy run with some faster bits on Thursday, and hopefully that will set me up for the race.

All that is in between looking around for photo opportunities.