WWII and Washington Memorials at Night

Posted on June 14th, 2012 by

What the What?

Two posts this week? What? Yep, I am having so much of a good time taking and processing photos I figured I need to step up my game. As a side note I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers where he professes the need to spend 10,000 hours to become an expert at any task. More processing and photo taking makes for a quicker path to 10,000 hours! WAHOO!

Blue Hour

I am finding that I really love blue hour. The quality of the light in the sky is just wonderful. It’s also interesting to me how quickly blue hour ends and the lights from the city overwhelm the good light. I took this photo at 8:57pm…4 minutes later I had stepped to the right to shoot the Washington Monument straight on and the sky was an awful sickly salmon color.

New Monuments

Every time a new monument gets put up on the National Mall, there is a controversy. The first time we visited DC, the WWII memorial was in the planning stages. The second time it was under construction. While my Grandfather was a veteran of WWI (Navy in the Pacific) I had mixed feeling about the placement of the memorial. Seeing the completed memorial has completely changed my mind. It really just fits there…like it should have been there all along.

Technicals

This was a 3 bracket series (-2, 0, +2) processed with Photomatix. It was cleaned up in Photoshop and modified with Nik Color Efex Pro 4 (Tonal Contrast) and Sharpener Pro. The final work was done in Adobe Lightroom 4.