Yarra River at night

I’m a big fan of night time photography – especially in cities, where the sky will always do some interesting things if you get the exposure right.  I also enjoy doing wide panorama shots by stitching images together in post processing to give a sweeping view of the scene.  Combining these two techniques can create a unique image, such as this shot I took in Melbourne a few years back.

This photo is taken from a walkway along the Yarra River where many of the city’s restaurants are located.   With the city’s financial district across on the other bank of the river the skyline is impressive, especially by night.   On this occassion I didn’t have a tripod with me as I walked back from dinner in a restaurant towards the hotel, but there were bollards along the walkway with nice flat tops – perfect for resting a camera on.

The key thing with a panorama, especially at night, is to shoot in manual exposure and manual focus modes, and keep the exposure and focus the same for all the shots.  Also you need to overlap adjacent shots to make stitching them easy, and you need to aim to keep the horizon level.

This image is made up for 7 photographs, and stiched together by the panoramic tool built into Photoshop Elements.  If you zoom in to the full resolution image and look closely you can spot places where the merging isn’t perfect, but at any reasonable distance the shot is convincing as one single image.

I love the colour in this shot, which is always the surprise that night time photography can reward you with.  If I was to do it again I would move further down the river (to the left) to get a viewpoint that is more centred between the two bridges in the shot – this would help keep the water line straight also.