September school holiday was around the corner, so I took the opportunity to join a photography trip organized by Photojam Channel. The trip was all about model portrait shoot… but of I couldn’t pass this golden opportunity to shoot this famous straits mosque in Malacca while at it. While my family were off to shopping mall in town in the evening, I went straight to this mosque… which is only about 4-5km away from town.
Upon reaching there, I went to the left side from the mosque entrance… which required a bit of climbing on rocks to reach to the shooting location. My setup was simple, XT4 coupled with XF 18-55mm kitlens on a tripod. Nothing fancy, but I did played around with ND filters. Here’s how the “behind the scene” looked like below.
Shot some couple of bracketing and some long exposure… just to cover all my base. Sunset was so so… not that great.
Anyway, back to my post processing, here’s what I’ve chosen to merge them into HDR. The middle shot was at F16 | ISO 160 | 10sec and both the left and right were 2 stops under exposed (2.5sec) and 2 stops overexposed (40sec).
I used Photomatix to merge them into a single HDR photo… and below is the result after being merged.
From here on, I used Photoshop to adjust the brightness, saturation, color/white balance and also cloning out sensor dusts… then followed by Nik Software CEP4 to further enhance the contrast and adding some warm tone back into the otherwise “cold muted” sunset. Here’s the result below.
Looks much better with the warmer tone. However, I felt the sea was still not smooth enough even though I’ve let the shutter opened for 40 seconds. So I thought, why not add some motion blur onto the sea? No harm trying, right? Let’s see below.
I knew it would look so much better with the sea water smoothened out. After that, I would go through one round of denoise using Topaz Denoise. Lastly, I imported the photo back into Lightroom… applied slight de-vignetting and a tad of overall image sharpening… and it’s done!
Final result of the mosque as below.
Shot with XT4 + XF 18-55mm F2.8 – 4 (18mm, 10sec at F16, ISO 160)
