This is one of my favourite images taken from the apartment where I am staying in Medellin, Colombia. Each and every evening we are greeted by a wicked thundershower or an amazing sunset. Sometimes, on lucky nights, we are treated to both at once; this was one of those nights. Medellin has become somewhat of a home for me. Although I will constantly be travelling over the next little while, I have decided to make this beautiful city my hub for the next little while. I will be giving away my travel plans in a couple of days, but no matter where I go over that period of time I plan on continually returning to, refreshing in, and reliving Medellin.
The Shot
I would be lying if I told you that there was no post-production on this image, and I sure that it doesn’t take a brilliant photographer to notice that. What I’ve done here, however, is much more than meets the eye, however. Actually this isn’t one single image, this is four. I actually took four vertical photos and pasted them together in a panoramic; the original image is actually nearly 37 megapixels. However, pasting this image together wasn’t enough. I made HDR versions of each of the four images before pasting them together. Matching the colours and exposures was a bit of a challenge, but photoshop CS5 did a lot of the work for me. The lesson to this image is the panoramic. Most people think to only shoot panoramics while holding the camera horizontally. You can also do it by holding the camera vertically, you’ll get a great swath of the area you are capturing and a huge image in case you want to make a poster sized print.