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My wife Liz and I were enjoying an evening's sight seeing around St Mark's Square in Venice. The sun was close to setting and the fierce heat of the day was finally abating when we paid our dues and made our trip up the elevator to the viewing platform at the top of the famous clock tower.
We arrived at the top just a few minutes before sunset along with about a hundred other tourists, all clutching cameras of various sorts and all wanting a photo of the sunset from the one side of the tower that faced west.
We were a well ordered and polite bunch, each taking a few photos then stepping out of the way to allow the next hopeful a chance.
I used my waiting time to set up my camera to give me the best possible chance of a decent exposure. There was no way I could use my tripod in that sort of environment, and the light levels were low with very high contrast between the sky and land. Tricky.
In the end I fitted a 3 stop ND grad filter to my lens to darken the sky to a reasonable level, opened up the aperture to a very wide (for me) f5.6, upped the ISO to 200 and switched on the lens stabilisation to give me the best chance of a shake free image.
In the end everything worked out OK. I took my two or three exposures of the Venetian skyline at sunset, checking the histogram and adjusting the exposure upwards to give me the most shadow detail the camera could manage without blowing out the sky.
Checking the images on a large screen back home I was pleased with how well this particular one came out, with a lovely ambiance to it that really captured the mood that evening.
Filename - venice skyline 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @105mm
Exposure - 1/60sec @ f5.6, ISO200
Location - Venice, Italy
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - ND grad filter used to balance exposure. Lens stabilisation used to prevent image blur.
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