Photo Tip: Belfort Golden Hour–On-location Brugge, Belgium
Golden Hour at the Belfort of Brugge (aka Bruges) —
PHOTO TIP – BRACKET FOR QUALITY NOT HDR: Photo tips for photographing people, culture and landscapes of Europe. To get optimal quality and superb pixel depth, I like to bracket and shoot in raw. For this sunset, I set up my Sony A7Rii and Zeiss Batis 18mm lens on a tripod and captured a set of five raw images one stop apart. This way I get one image that is a perfect exposure for the sky, one for the water, one for the buildings, etc. But I do not bracket for the HDR effect. Instead, I combine several exposures to produce better pixel depth so I can raise the shadows without getting noise and print large format fine art prints with tack-sharp pixels. So I avoid using the auto toning or HDR effects when merging the images in Lightroom. Once I have a merged DNG image I run through some quick Lightroom edits to reproduce the fabulous light my eyes were seeing during this sublime golden hour. Finally, I hit Cmd+E to bring the image into Photoshop (Be sure to change your default export setting to PSD instead of TIFF) Then I do some spot cleanup, lens distortion correction, selective sharpening on the buildings, color balance or photo filter and a bit of dodging and burning. Voila’!–
