Hong Kong – The Peak

Hong Kong – The Peak

At 5pm we were standing on top of the observatory on Victoria Peak, looking out over the vastness that is Hong Kong. We were 2.5 hours early, claiming our spots before the hoards turned up. We weren’t allowed to sit, making our wait a little bit less comfortable. 2 hours seems far longer when you’re staring at a virtually unchanging scene.

As the crowd began to thicken, everything became a lot more claustrophobic. Our only jobs were to stand our ground and hold the fort so that no other make take our perfect view of the city. As the sun began to disappear, and the scene before us became more interesting, phone after phone would glide past the side of my head from onlookers behind me, hoping to capture the city in all its glory.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them their camera flash probably wasn’t strong enough to light up the city.

In truth, once the night fell, Beboy and I weren’t shooting for long. The scene, as glorious as it is, offers little variety, so it doesn’t require a great deal of time to capture.

The tricky part was getting out. We were jammed in by layers of people. We could barely reach our bags below, and once we did, we couldn’t stand up again. One swift, but friendly nudge into the person behind me and he gave me a bit of breathing space, so that I could slowly carve my way through the crowd.

It was a wonderful sight, but certainly not an experience I’d do again in a hurry!

Today’s Photo – The Peak

Please remember: You can download my free luminosity mask actions, as well as other great actions, for free. Find Out More.

I had a very vivid idea of how I wanted to represent this scene beforehand. It was important not to shoot too wide – I wanted the buildings to be larger, and the composition to be a snug fit.

I wanted to create a frame of sorts, using the trees in the foreground as the bottom half of the frame, and then create a darker vignette in the sky that would roughly replicate the shape of the trees.

Just above the city, I wanted to create beautiful glow, to give the cityscape more life.

I combined four exposures to create this image. I layered the -3 into the -2 exposure first, controlling the highlights, and then blended those layers into the base exposure. I used the brightest exposure to restore some information in the dark foreground where the trees are. I used luminosity masks to make a selection of the shadows, but to exclude the city and buildings lights down there too, and then I very gently painted in the trees near the buildings.

At a lower opacity, I then painted in the trees further from the buildings. I purposefully kept this area darker because I wanted to give the feeling that the buildings were illuminating the foreground trees, and I was also left with a nice, natural vignette. I also ran the dodge tool over the foreground trees, just to brighten them up a tiny bit more.

I then added a little bit of texture to the faint clouds in the sky. And finally, I restored the green colouring to the trees and added some extra blue to the sky, through a simple Color Balance layer.

Before/After Comparison