{"id":7604,"date":"2015-02-07T08:00:35","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T21:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alexwisephotography.net\/blog\/?p=7604"},"modified":"2015-01-26T10:37:27","modified_gmt":"2015-01-25T23:37:27","slug":"before-and-after-aami-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alexwisephotography.net\/blog\/2015\/02\/07\/before-and-after-aami-park\/","title":{"rendered":"Before and After – AAMI Park"},"content":{"rendered":"

[twentytwenty]<\/p>\n

\"Aami<\/a> \"Aaami<\/a>
\n<\/a>[\/twentytwenty]<\/p>\n

Capturing the Photo<\/h2>\n

Fireworks at AAMI Park<\/a> as captured in 2011 during a sports game at one of Melbourne’s iconic sports venues.<\/p>\n

After passing by it on my commute every day to work, I’d always wanted to capture a long exposure of the traffic going beneath the bridge with the stadium all lit up with a game being on. Timing for this photo was key where I wanted it to be a clear forecast so I could get a nice blue sky around blue hour. \u00a0I waited a few weekends where an event would be on but the forecast wasn’t really on my side. Eventually I got lucky\u00a0with the forecast and luckily there was a time playing so decided to pounce. The plan was to arrive just on sunset to setup and capture an image around blue hour which would provide a nice even light over the scene and allow me to capture the lines from the constant flowing traffic beneath.<\/p>\n

\"Various<\/a>
Various photos taken over the night.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was by luck that AAMI Park uses fireworks for when a team scores a goal. Even more lucky was that many a goals were being scored. I have to be honest – photographing fireworks isn’t my strong point and I really wanted to capture it in one image rather than blending the fireworks into the shot. Thanks to the fireworks going off every 5-10 minutes it let me get the right photo eventually in a 20 second exposure at F\/13. For this photo I used the Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 17-40 and a tripod.<\/p>\n

Processing the Image<\/h2>\n

The challenge for this photo (and something I find a lot when shooting night time) is battling the warm temperatures of the street lights. For this image,\u00a0I could of edited it entirely in Lightroom by using the adjustment brush and saturation but I wanted\u00a0a greater level of control over the image where I could make small-scale changes to a small selection without affecting the overall image.This is where I encourage the use of layer masks in Photoshop due to their ability to allow you to make selective changes to an image. Want to increase the saturation of just the reds of the traffic flowing past without increasing the saturation to other reds in your image? Layer masks is your answer.<\/p>\n

[box type=”info” style=”rounded”]More information about layer masks and blending can be found in\u00a0an earlier post about layer masks<\/a> on my blog[\/box]<\/p>\n

Using layer masks on the bottom half of the image, I used a mixture of selective saturation changes, curves channel changes (adjusting the Red channel shadows and mid tones to reduce the red) and introducing a cold photo filter\u00a0.\u00a0I’m probably not 100% with the bottom half of the image but much prefer it over the original\u00a0image where the lights create a high temperature over the scene.<\/p>\n

With the high temperature traffic lights cooled down I then went about editing the sky and stadium. The changes here were quite simple and included:<\/p>\n