We are continuing our “how was this picture taken?” series of articles and this time I present an image of the Sokullu Mehmet Pasha mosque, which I captured at sunrise from a rooftop of a hotel in Istanbul:
The answer has been posted here.
This will hopefully be an interesting choice for the series, because I was challenged with a few issues when capturing the mosque. Unfortunately, I cannot disclose what the issues were, as they will give away the answer. So, how was this image captured and with what specific techniques? What is the approximate exposure time, aperture and ISO? Was the image captured hand-held or off a tripod? How was the image post-processed?
Let the fun begin! Please post your analysis / guess in the comments section below!
I think this image was taken around 15 minutes after sunset at f5-8 55mm. And 10 second shutter..
I will take a wild guess here.
Your challenges were as following.
You only had fuji xpro2 and 56mm 1.2 lens because the istanbul trip was not your photo gear trip. And the lighting condition from the sun was changing fast. No time to set up tripod.
Brenizer method was used to stitch multiple shots together in post processing. You took photos in quick succession due to the fast changing atmosphere lighting condition. ISO 1600-2400. F stop f4 to f11. Hand held. Exposure 1/200 ish.
My guesses:
The perspective looks like 24 or 35mm equivalent focal length, aperture must be 8 or higher since everything is in focus
Just at sunrise, the sun rays are hitting the clouds to the right.
Huge contrast of the scene, exposed for the lights, shadows brought up in PP
No perspective correction in post
Colors look like Fuji
ISO in the lowish range – 200 or 400 if taken with a Fuji.
Exposure time in the range of seconds – so some kind of support, tripod or sth else
No HDR, the lights are too close to burning out.
My guess is this was shot before sunrise. There are no people and several of the building lights are still on. Depending on how many minutes before sunrise (I’m guessing about 30), the exposure could have been 20-60 seconds, using a tripod. The challenge would be overexposing the lit area on the left side of the building in the foreground. Combining exposures in Photoshop or HDR could address this. Another guess is the use of a soft graduated neutral density, with the darker side of the GND over the lower part of the scene, with the graduation starting at about the 2nd roof of the mosque.
I am also making a wild guess that the focal length is between 15-20mm, but post process to correct the distortion. This resulted in about 30% of the lower half of the photo being cropped out.
The perspective on the buildings is odd. There appears to be keystoning from the bottom of the frame to above the center of the frame (the building behind the mosque to the left leans out, not in as I think it would if it were barrel distortion). So it looks like the camera was tilted away from the subject. Maybe that is what a tilt-shift lens does, I don’t know (I am new to all this). So it looks to me like the photo was actually cropped from a portrait layout exposure, although I don’t know why you would do that unless you thought the foreground buildings would look odd if the camera were not tilted up. It does seem like two exposures, unless they keep the mosques lit until daybreak in Istanbul. Please be gentle. Like I said, I am new to this.
Never mind, I see I had that backwards. The camera is pointed down, not up. Like I said, new to this…
Eric
This photo is taken at a single shot only in early morning. The color of sky speaks about the early morning color. The yellow tone in the mosque is the lighting of the mosque as we can see the shadow of dome. Indeed it is wide angle and longer exposure. Used tripod as sharpness will not come with hand held for longer exposure else VR works great as shutter speed seems to be around 1/5.
Eagerly waiting for your comments about this photo to reveal suspense.
My forensic analysis results are:
rooftop of sultan’s palace hotel with the Fuji Xpro2 + 10-24mm F4,
focal: 14 or 16mm
aperture: F8
ISO: 400? (not100 definitly)
exp time something between 1/50 1/100
and i guess it was handhled.
cheers!
I would say that this photo was shot shortly after dawn with the rising sun’s light full on the mosque’s eastern face, while their own outdoor lighting had not yet turned itself off. I’d say you used a white balance around 3800, with a medium f/stop around 5.6 with a relatively slow shutter speed, maybe 1/500 or so with the ISO around 800. It looks like you were slightly overexposed. I think you were zoomed out to maybe 300 mm, and maybe used some active-d lighting to bring out those soft blue tones. I can picture you waking up early and looking out the sliding glass door, and grabbing your camera when you saw the light. Whatever you did, it’s a great photo.
With a little help from Google maps it seems like you took this from on top of the Sultan Palace hotel, likely at sunset from angles of the shadows, illumination provided by the setting sun near the horizon, which also lit the clouds pink.
Guessing something like F8, fairly low ISO, shadows boosted in post.
Oops I misidentified the shadows. The light is coming from the left, which makes it the rising sun.
Changed my mind again. Didn’t realize how much artificial lights there were in Mosque. I’d say this was taken when the sun is below the horizon, as most of the yellow light looks like it’s coming from the various lanterns laced around the mosque.
If the sun was above the horizon the higher parts of the mosque should have more yellowish light than the lower parts, but the tall spires are largely unlit.
I’d still vote for sunrise. Can’t really figure out from the scene whether the sun is coming from the left (East) or the right (West), but the scene is devoid of people. If it was at sunset there should be more people around on the various buildings. Makes more sense that people are still asleep at sun rise.
So, to summarize, final final answer:
Sunrise.
Yellow light from artificial illumination.
Single shot, wide angle, F8ish, ISO 400 or less
Shot from the roof of the Sultan Palace.
Probably used tripod or propped on the concrete ledge of the hotel roof.
Shadows lifted in post.
It was probably on a weekend too, as people are sleeping in.
Flag shows no wind so a fast shutter wasn’t required to minimize motion of the clouds and trees. The clouds don’t show smearing so the shutter time wasn’t too long. The vertical lines of the edges of the buildings at the edges of the photo diverge somewhat indicating a wider than normal lens, but the distance between foreground and background objects does not appear to be stretched out so the lens wasn’t overly wide. The image is sharp front to back indicating a small aperture. There is noise apparent at the horizon indicating either a high ISO or a lot of shadow recovery in post processing—I suspect the latter. So my guess is 24-35mm lens at f16 for 1/30 sec, handheld with shadow recovery and pink cloud enhancement in post processing. It is difficult to be precise without knowing if you were using a full frame or crop sensor camera.