Last week I wanted to lose some sleep and get up before dawn was even close! I decided that I may as well take my camera for a short trip to Washington, D.C. since I would be awake with nothing to do. The alarm started to buzz at 4:00am and it seemed for a moment that my idea of rising early may have been a bad one. Struggling out of the bed I managed to washup and get dressed by 4:30am. Soon after I was traveling to Washington, D.C. with a few other intrepid early morning folks.
My photographic object was to capture both the U.S. Supreme Court Building and the U.S. Capitol Dome during the blue hour and at sunrise. The sun rose behind and to the left of the Supreme Court building and therefore lit the U.S. Capitol Dome which is directly across the street from the courthouse. I also wanted to capture these buildings from a few different vantage points. The first photo of the U.S. Supreme Court Building was taken at 5:27am during the blue hour. You can see the crescent moon above the building. I could not backup any further because I would have been standing in the street!
After taking this photo, I crossed the street and setup my tripod on the sidewalk facing the U.S. Capitol and took this photo at 5:31am. The blue hour is clearly captured in the sky and the dome was well illuminated by the building lights.
Sunrise was at approximately 6:00am, so as I looked back to the Supreme Court the sky was starting to light up in anticipation of sunrise. I setup in front of the courthouse and took a series of photos with differing camera settings. My goal was to bracket as much as possible and use the power of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to process the photos when I returned home. The following three photos were from that series. The first photo is done in a portrait format, the second is a Lightroom HDR image made up of 3 photos. The third photo I tried to process with more purple in the sky.
The two photos below were taken 15 minutes apart, the first a little before sunrise at 5:56am and the second very near sunrise at 6:11am. I captured the security guard in both frames (no pun intended). The first photo was edited in both Lightroom and Photoshop and the second photo was only edited in Lightroom.
By now the sun was rising so I turned back to the Capitol and took the following photos. The first one is a single image. The second photo is a 2-image combination using the prior photo and another taken immediately following that capture. Both photos were then processed in Photoshop. I used the Select and Mask tool to place the bright dome and trees against the darker sky of the other image. I don’t think this one turned out very good, but I enjoyed the experiment!
So far it had been a good morning for photography, good subjects, great light and quiet streets! I looked around and saw that life was returning to the streets, joggers were heading towards me, traffic was beginning to flow and tourists were out early. It seemed like a good time to pack up and head home for breakfast and coffee!
This photo shoot provided me with the opportunity to work with different lighting situations and also use both Lightroom and Photoshop on similar photos. I learned a few things that will hopefully help me on my next cityscape photo shoot. By the way, I hope to be in Pittsburg in a few days to photograph some city scenes there.
Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to join me in my next photo adventure and learn if my photos have improved!
C'est la vie 