Chicago's Downtown with the D90

Over Labor Day weekend, I traveled to the windy city with the family to watch the Iowa football game and explore downtown. On Sunday I was able to go downtown and take a boat tour of the harbor which offered lots of good opportunity to take photographs of the awesome skyline. The weather was gloomy but that didn’t affect my excitement of the skyline.

 

Since I took the majority of these images from a boat, I was only able to take my D90 with the 18-105mm lense attached. With the gloomy weather, I had to watch my shutter speed from the moving boat so I changed the ISO value from 200-800 and kept shooting in RAW. I kept my aperture at around f7.1 or f8 and kept VR on the lense to help with sharp images.

 

Once in ViewNX, I changed the white balance to direct sunlight and adjusted the exposure compensation to help with the exposure of the images on the cloudy day. To add contrast to the images, I changed the picture control to nature landscape or top gear. NL is the custom curve I created while the TG I downloaded off the internet. Both of these curves darken the image, so the shadow protection slider was adjusted as well.

 

A additional step was performed in ViewNX by taking certain images and adjusting the exposure compensation from -2 to +2 to create an HDR image by combining multiply images. I then took these different exposed images and created a HDR image in EasyHDR. Because of the gloomy and cloudy skies, an HDR image in my mind created a very neat image.

 

Small adjustments were made in PSE8 with the help of the clone brush tool, smart brush tool and high pass sharpen filter. I used the smart brush tool to add color to the sky in the form of a blue tint or increased cloud contrast depending on how I wanted the image to look. The high pass sharpen filter was the last step to finalize the images.

 

The skyline of a major city was something new for me to photograph and it was an enjoyable experience. I was able to go from sea level on the boat to over 1000 feet up in the air when I was at the John Hancock building which offered a different perspective to take photographs. The next time I’m in Chicago, I will be taking pictures of the skyline in the dark.

 

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