I live at the foothills of the Dublin mountains, which has its pros and cons. On the negative side, alongside those mountains can get very very windy, but on the positive side I am only a few minutes drive away from some impressive views of Dublin city. That’s the theory at least. I haven’t yet found the viewpoint that I’m hoping to find, but recently I’ve been getting close.
The search started last December after I took this image of the iconic power station at Ringsend. That was taken from the carpark of Total Fitness in Sandyford (although it’s not really in Sandyford at all to be honest), a spot I returned to when the Space Shuttle was passing over on its way from Florida to the ISS in July.
The view that the car park gives is pretty good, but impeded by a lot of trees and buildings in the foreground. To get an uninterrupted view of the city, I needed to get higher.
At the weekend I went for an exploratory drive in the car a little further up the mountain, without the aid of a map or GPS (which perhaps would be the easier) and using my usually poor sense of direction. For much of the route I could tell there was a good view of the city to be had from the back garden of the houses on my left, but sadly not from the road. I went around a bend and then another and suddenly had a clear line of sight. Conveniently the road was wide enough to pull in.
The light wasn’t ideal, and I really just wanted to get an idea of what shots I could get in better light at some point in the future, but I did spend 10 minutes with a variety of lenses taking some photos.
The image i’ve posted today is a wider shot showing the countryside around me, with the city spread out below. A zoomed in shot of the city itself will follow.
To get the exposure right for this shot I had to take two shots, exposing in the first for the sky, and in the second for the land. I merged them in post processing and played around with the highlight and shadow detail (perhaps a little too much to be honest) to generate the image you see above. The end result suggests the light was better than it actually was, due to this multiple-exposure method. Any exposure of just the foreground resulted in a sky which was almost entirely blown out and so, as often is the case, I had to do what I could to overcome the bad light.
Recent Comments