Looking North

In my previous post I mentioned my hunt for a good vantage point from which to get a view of Dublin city, and posted a wide angle shot from a spot I found at the weekend.  I still think there’s a better view to be had from further up the Dublin mountains, but I was pleased to be able to almost fill the frame with Dublin city when I switched to my 50 – 150mm lens on Saturday.

With a shot like this it can be difficult to get the technicalites right.  The exposure varies across the frame as the sunlight varies across the city – for instance you can tell here that the city centre was in sunshine while the suburbs are in shade – at least a stop less light than the city centre, if not more.  The question then becomes which should you expose for?

A similar issue arises with focus.  Where do you pick for your focus point?  Will it ensure that alot of the frame stays in focus?

And it’s easy then to forget about composition – should you shoot to crop the final result, or go as tight as you can in camera?  And don’t forget to keep the horizon level.

For me on Saturday the decision making process went as follows:

Exposure

First I set the aperture to be f/11.  This gives me reasonably good depth of field, and still allows me use a manageable shutter speed.  Although I’m shooting on a tripod, longer shutter speeds still run the risk of introducing shake due to the mirror, the wind, or blur due to movement in the scene in front of the lens.  I then metered for the city centre, and having done so, added about a stop of compensation so that the city centre (in sunshine) will appear bright, being a tad overexposed, and the suburbs won’t be too dark.

Focus

Having steered clear of wide-open aperture and used something more reasonable, this is now less of a concern.  I focus a third of the way into the frame and rely on depth of field to keep me sharp.  Note that my focus point and my exposure point are different. This makes the preparation a two-stage thing.  I meter first, then manually set my exposure and move my focus point away from the city centre (the meter point) to somewhere a third into the frame.  I chose the Luas bridge in Dundrum to help the camera distinguish the wood from the trees, so to speak.

Composition

I decide to shoot to crop later, as to do otherwise is going to bring clutter into the foreground, or have too much sky in the frame.  And you can see from what little sky there is that it wasn’t exactly photogenic.  The quality of lenses falls off towards the edges in general, so I keep the city in the centre, vertically, of the frame, and just pick the left and right edges carefully so that I get a nice framing.   I can see Liberty Hall in the view, so I ensure to keep that in the shot, and a little away from the left-hand edge.  Also, the tripod allows me to get the horizon level in camera, and saves me having to crop more out of the shot during a straightening process later.

And click

The shot isn’t complete of course until I can post-process it, and like the previous image, this required a bit of work to get something approaching a reasonable level of contrast and detail.  I was battling against a haze that sat over the city, so there was only so much I could do.  The final image above is acceptable, but nothing stunning.  Sometime though the light will be just right, and I’ll go back for the stunning version.

In the meantime, it’s interesting to see how small Dublin actually is when viewed from here – in the foreground is Dundrum as I mentioned, you can see alot of the city centre working right from Liberty Hall, with some of the newer dockland buildings, and looking further north you can see what I believe is Airside Retail Park in Swords, and possibly even some of the airport.  Had I turned my camera a little further west, I’m sure Ikea would have come into the frame.

It may feel like a big city when you drive across it, but from this vantage point in the Dublin mountains, it doesn’t look it.