Dallas Skyline

I tried something a little different for me last night -- shooting the Dallas skyline at sunset. It was supposed to be a group event, organized by Adventures In Photography of North Texas. But the threat of severe thunderstorms in the forecast convinced the organizer to postpone. Because I'm apparently an idiot with no regard for my own well-being, I went anyway.

Good news -- the forecast storms never materialized.  I found the spot where we hard agreed to meet fairly easily, but also found the Trinity River to be much lower than expected.  Since I wanted a reflection in my foreground, I had to move to where the water was and compose accordingly.  This was actually the clearest reflection of my entire shoot, as a persistent breeze picked up shortly after I arrived.

I arrived well before sunset to have ample time to experiment with position and composition.  A Great Egret thought this scene needed a foreground element.

As the egret moved on, I decided to try the same scene without my polarizer.  I don't like it nearly as much without the reflection of the buildings and with so much of the blue from the sky gone.

It wasn't an especially colorful sunset, but there was a brief window when the clouds picked up some pink.  The lights on the buildings were starting to come on and be more noticeable, too.

I wanted to get a good amount of both the clouds and the reflection in this shot, but the building to the left of Reunion Tower wasn't adding anything.  So I cropped this one as a 4x5 instead of a 4x6.

I shot everything with a two-stop bracket in each direction, but ended up not caring for most of the HDR blends.  Most of them sacrificed too much sharpness without adding enough additional detail.  This is the bracketed version of the previous shot, and actually seems to have less detail in the shadows.  Go figure.

The sky in the background kept getting darker (not surprisingly), but for a while I continued to pick up some nice reflection of the lighter sky to the west in some of the buildings.

I switched to a portrait orientation to get more of the clouds and longer reflections in the water for just one shot.

About an hour after I started I decided the sky was probably about as dark as it was going to get, took one last shot, and packed up for the night.

It felt great to get back out shooting for the first time since April in Ennis, and to try a different sort of landscape photography!