Colourful City Abstract

WHAT

This is a detailed look at the side of the colourful 'Santos' building on Tank Street, Brisbane City. The grey/blue squares are the windows and the pink/red/orange colours mark each floor of the building.

WHY

On this particular day, I'd been searching for some 'abstract' style shots around Brisbane City. This building caught my eye because of the contrasting bright colours. I thought it was a perfect candidate image to add to one of the groups of which I'm a member on 'Redbubble' called "Abstract Lines".

It wasn't until I took at look at this shot on my computer that I realised I'd managed to capture 2 office ceiling lights on the right hand side of my image, which I quite liked.

HOW

For this shot, I was standing on the footpath a block over from the Santos building and at about a 45 degree angle to the side of the Santos building. I used a tripod and attached my 70-300m lens so I could sufficiently zoom in to the colourful features of the building and exclude the sky or any other nearby structures. I set the camera to manual mode and zoomed to 180mm.

Taken at aperture f/10 and 1/200s shutter speed

POST PRODUCTION

I used photoshop to slightly increase the vibrance of the building's colours

Graffiti man

WHAT
This piece of street art was located on one of the walls of the Fortitude Valley Firestation, Brisbane City. I'm not sure, but it looks like something done by the notorious street artist, Banksy.

WHY
I liked the idea that the 'simpleton' holding the camera up to his face (most likely to photograph the nearby landmark Storey Bridge) is likely to get smacked in the face if the fire door suddenly opens.

This piece of artwork amused me because it reminded me of myself when I'm taking photos - a bit of a 'simpleton' and oblivious to what's going on around me :)

HOW
I used a tripod as this image was taken at about 8pm. I used an aperture setting of 8 and a shutter speed of about 2.5 seconds. ISO setting was 200.

POST PRODUCTION
This HDR image was created using a single shot which was then converted into 3 exposures of -2,0,+2 using photoshop. At the time of taking the photo, I'd been taking three shots at the previously mentioned exposures, however when I tonemapped the 3 images in photomatix I wasn't happy with the results, hence why I ended up using a single original image to create three exposures.

After creating the HDR image (which was originally in colour) I used photoshop to produce the black and white version and increased contrast and clarity.