I've been to a lot of cities in the world (one big gap being the cities of the US) and I've always thought that Sydney, one of the first places I visited outside of New Zealand, was one of the best looking cities on the planet. My return visit the other week only helped to affirm that belief. Sure, at ground level the great cities of Europe are hard to beat but from a distance, with that harbour, that bridge, that skyline and that Opera house, Sydney is hard to beat.
Our trip the other week was to visit old friends but I did manage to steal away for a few hours to Milsons point to capture the skyline at dusk.
It's been a while since I spent a good amount of time doing a manual blend of an image, but after giving this 3 shot panorama a quick and rough edit I decided that it was probably worth spending a bit more time with it. So I went back to the original images and manually blended the highlights from the under exposed images with the over exposed images which brought back a lot of detail. The middle image of the brackets were then used to remove light trails from boats on the harbour (one decided to streak right past the Opera house at the wrong moment). This took me quite a lot of time, however the process was sped along by my recent purchase of a Wacom graphics tablet. I think the end result was worth the time I spent on it.
The image presented here is a little small to show all the detail in the image so it's totally worth checking out in higher resolution on either 500px or Flickr, just click whichever one you prefer.
