Shooting through the glass in Hong Kong with Elia Locardi and Fstoppers
posted Tuesday, February 16, 2016 at 10:51 PM EDT
Fstoppers' Lee Morris and Patrick Hall head to Hong Kong with travel photographer Elia Locardi for another installment in Elia's Photographing the World: Cityscape, Astrophotography, and Advanced Post-Processing tutorial. In the behind-the-scenes videos below (episodes 13 and 14 in Fstoppers' Behind The Scenes series), the team provides a humorous take on a variety of topics.
The first photography tip comes when Elia is trying to get a night shot of Hong Kong's skyline through thick glass. He says, "Sometimes when you go to cities, the best you can get is going to be through thick glass." You're going to have to find a way to deal with the reflections and minimize their impact on your image as much as possible.
Later on, we see the guys using a Manfrotto Magic Arm in lieu of a tripod to attach their camera to a railing for skyline images across the harbor. Unfortunately, due to smog, the entire segment had to be scrapped from the final tutorial. The rest of this behind-the-scenes video is essentially the guys having an adventurous night out on the town. Check out the video below, warning, there is some NSFW language.
Episode 14 kicks off with Lee and Patrick eating Chinese foods that they bought for each other. After that, they spend a considerable amount of time searching for a very specific location. They do eventually find it and Elia discusses its appeal. They're shooting from a small bridge overlooking eight lanes of divided traffic that span multiple levels. By using long exposures, you're able to utilize the traffic at night as compositional leading lines. For the final image, Elia wants to use bracketed exposures to photograph the scene during the blue hour and then capture 30-second exposures of the cars after dark to create a composite image with as many trails as possible.
All in all, the crew had a pretty tough time in Hong Kong. If you head over to the full article at Fstoppers, you can see some of the shots that Elia captured in Hong Kong and also images he shot last year. For more information on the cityscape photography tutorial, see here and check out the video below. Elia's first tutorial on landscape photography is available here.
(Seen via Fstoppers)