Sunset on the Clyde

We’ve been having a string of amazing sunsets over the last week here in Scotland. I decided to get in on the action and take some shots of Glasgow’s skyline. It’s difficult to get, because there aren’t too many spots where you can see all the iconic locations in one shot – there are always buildings in the way, or you’re too far away to get a clear picture. I went around on my bike for about 2 hours scouting out spots, and I settled on the south side of the river at the Quay shopping area. This way, I could get the river, Glasgow Tower, BBC building, Clyde Arc, Finnieston Crane, and SECC all in one shot. The problem was in order to get them into one shot you had to be far back – and I mean far.

I tried to use my 50mm, but everything looked too tiny because of the distance. I reached for my 70-200 and decided on taking some panoramics. The problem was that by the time the sun was setting most of the shots had to be around 8 seconds, which means that you have to keep your camera rock solid. I pulled out my tripod, set is as low as I could while still being able to get everything, and used a shutter cable instead of actually touching the camera. However, some of the shots were still a bit blurry.

I realized that it was the vibration caused by the mirror slapping open to expose the sensor. Luckily, my 5DIII has a mirror lockup mode. This allows you to hit the shutter cable once and the mirror opens up, then you click it again to take the shot. You have to wait about a second or two between the mirror opening and exposing the sensor in order to let the vibrations dissipate, but it works wonders.

I tried a lot of 3 shot exposures to combine later for an HDR image, but I really wasn’t happy with them (I almost never like HDR pictures). My favorites were all as the sun was nearly completely below the horizon with the camera set to expose for the sky. I actually like the buildings falling slightly into silhouette and catching the sun in their windows. The HDR images looked too evenly exposed and unnatural for my taste.

Below are my favorite two from the evening. The first is a series of 5 images and the settings were as follows:

5dIII | 70-200 f/2.8 @ 130mm f/8 | 1 second | ISO 200 | 64MP final image

The second is my favorite:

5dIII | 70-200 f/2.8 @ 200mm f/13 | 8 seconds | ISO 100 | 126MP final image

Here is the uncropped image straight out of camera with no edits:

Here is a 100% crop of the area right in front of the SECC. The detail is staggering because of the 126MP:

You might notice that I added an entire bottom portion to the final image that isn’t in the original. Luckily, I took a similar picture just before this that included most of what I needed. I was able to blend that image into this one to fill in all the parts that I unfortunately left out.

If you’d like to learn how to create and edit panoramics I’ve written a blog post that can be found here.