The Old State House in Boston is a
historic building that many local and traveling photographers visit to capture
in a beautiful picture that lasts a lifetime. It is a challenging undertaking
as it is buried in modern and old architecture. The Custom House of Boston with
its Clock Tower is overshadows the cityscape. I tried many compositions and
decided that Landscape over Portrait Format works best. Busy State Street and
Washington Street intersect next to the State House and it is not easy to
capture an image at those long exposures without any cars driving through the
frame. Once I set up tripod and found my final landscape horizontal composition
I figured out that my best chances are when the traffic lights on Washington
Street turn green and cars on State Street had to stop further down on State
Street at a red light. After a few unsuccessful tryouts I also realized that shutter speeds of 30
seconds were not going to work out for what I visualized. I therefore
compromised my camera settings and switched to a slightly larger aperture of
f/18. This adjustments allowed for a faster exposure time of 6 seconds while
maintaining image quality and Depth of Field. So I patiently waited for my chance and once the
last car swirled around the corner from Washington onto State Street I released
the camera self-timer for multiple exposures that seemed to last minutes.
Frustrated at times, because cars still appeared out of nowhere driving into
the frame, I finally succeeded before twilight disappeared and captured an
image that satisfied my quest for another unique addition to my magical Boston
twilight photography gallery. During post processing I removed dust spots,
minimally adjusted contrast, lighting and color saturation before sharpening
the final image of the historic Boston downtown scenery.
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