Hamburg Harbour

Hamburg. Harbour and city. Cultural center. Known for its high quality of living in Germany, this city of nearly 1.8 million is rather large and spread out. I was there one cold...make that very cold, winter's day in December. The snow was unrelentless in falling and dusting everything with a magical white powder. I made the following images by the river, just near the harbour.

The first is from the 20 up Bar at the Empire Riverside Hotel, which features a fantastic view of the harbour. We were told we could not photograph at the bar...but I discretely set up my tripod...leveled the Photoclam Multiflex head, and fired the H3D with the 28mm lens set in AE.



Exposure at f/5.6 was 32s at ISO100, and used the Hasselblad internal metering's AE. I merely set for f/5.6 because the nearest images were quite a distance away, and I set the lens for hyperfocal. And let the camera decide on the exposure. Almost all the time, the in camera AE mode turned out good for night cityscapes. I cropped the image from portrait to landscape and did some post processing on this file in CS4, but not a whole lot...just an autolevels, and very slight saturation increase. The lines you see which traverse across the photograph on the top right is an aeroplane's corn trail, and those on the river are made by barges moving in the water.

A bit further river and a couple of hours earlier, I also photographed these beautiful cantilevered office buildings, covered in snow.



Metering was done by the Zone system, placing the snow in the foreground in zone 8. A small levels adjustment in CS4 was necessary in post processing.

I passed by a small house on my way back to the car, and could not resist taking a photograph...though I wish the lights inside were on...I imagined it to be a warm glowing light coming from inside...to contrast the white, almost bitter cold outside.



And on the way back to the car, the park for dogs.