LightningPaul

The port of Zeebrugge, Belgium, handles lots of containers. Such ship as above carries thousands of them. It takes six weeks to sail from China. Unloading is a long process. Almost every day I pass this place by car when driving home or to my job. It's so fascinating to see the huges cranes working hard. In December during the last part of the blue hour, which was at 17h30, I finally took the time to park the car on a good spot, set up my tripod and start shooting images.



TECH-INFO: In night and mostly also blue hour photography you are many times dealing with very high contrasts. You can leave the shadows very dark, which can result into moody images, or let the lights blow out. The latter is OK as long it's not too much.
A good solution would be to shoot multiple exposures and make a HDR file. Though the cranes were in action so each shot picture is different. This ends in HDR images with ghosting and requires lots of Photoshop work to fix that. I used another HDR technique called exposure blending which is in Photomatrix and I think in Photoshop too. It combines the images in a great way. You see no ghosting but instead you get the effect of long exposures, which is perfectly fine.

For the image above I shot 9 JPGs with each a stop difference. I wanted to set my white balance on tungsten light but by accident I have set it on auto. So it is close to day light which makes the image pretty warm.
The pictures got first processed in DxO Optics Pro. This program is ideal to remove lens distortion, vignetting, lens softness (mainly present in the corners), typical camera noise and a bunch of other artifacts. After exposure merging in Photomatrix I increased the contrast in Photoshop, darkened the top part of the sky a bit and added some small rectangular vignetting.



I received an email of DxO Labs with a coupon for a reduction of 15% on the products DxO Optics Pro and DxO Filmpack. I think it's valid until 31st of March. To claim your discount just go to the DxO Labs online store (https://shop.dxo.com) and enter my Personal Sponsor Code: RAF9GX4KU as a discount voucher. I'll be honest, every time someone gets 15% reduction using this code I get an Amazon shopping voucher.