Nikon D3, 17 mm, f/22, 1/80, ISO 1000.
Or simply German Fountain as Wikipedia calls it. It’s in a park next to the blue mosque in Istanbul. You can read more about it here if you are interested.
From now on I’m going to put more effort into writing about how I shot the pictures I post here. Which focal length, f-stop, shutter speed and so on. And, even more importantly why I used a specific setting and what I was thinking of when shooting the picture and so on. I hope this will make the blog more interesting.
I shot this one with my 17-35 mm f/2.8 lens at its widest angle. I have been experimenting a lot lately with having the sun in the image, getting that flare thing. I think it gives another dimension to the image, makes it a bit more interesting at least. I stepped down the lens to its smallest aperture which on this lens is f/22. That’s what makes the sun star-like. A bigger aperture (smaller f-stop value) would just make it a round white thing. I’m not really sure how to get nice flares. Those big and round things that you see sometimes. Probably depends on the lens too. I guess the lenses today are made to remove flares so maybe it’s better to use an old lens when you want that effect.
I had my camera set to auto-iso with slowest shutter speed of 1/80. Because I stopped down the aperture so much the camera raised the ISO to 1000. Not a big issue with my Nikon D3 but to be perfect I should have shot this at 1/30 instead and a lower ISO.
What about the composition then. Not to happy about it actually. I walked around this fountain a couple of times trying to get a good angle but did’nt quite figure it out. This one is too centered but it was the best I could do with this subject.
In post using Lightroom I changed the camera profile to vivid. I really like that profile when I want shiny, glowing and vibrant colors. Changed the tone curve to strong contrast and added a bit of clarity (+22). Finally I wanted a bit more blue in the sky so I went into the luminance tab and darkened the blues a bit (-12). That’s it.
Beautiful, well done.