While down in Old Montreal yesterday, I swung by Montreal City Hall to grab a few shots of this majestic building.

With the clouds from the morning having pretty much cleared, the mid-afternoon soon was pretty bright, and not really my favorite time to be out shooting, but I took some shots anyway.

Part of my wanting to get some shots of the Town Hall (despite having already quite a few in the ever-growing Lightroom library), I was trying to get some shots that I thought may work well with the pencil line effect that I experimented with the other day in Topaz Labs Adjust.

The most difficult part of the creation process is deciding which parts of the original image to paint back in. I can’t say that I’m 100% happy with the first image, but having tried a few different versions (such as leaving the Town Hall as a line drawing and Painting back the rest), I decided this was the best.

City Hall pencil drawing
ISO 100 – 10mm – f4.5 – 1/640 sec (-2ev/0/+2ev)

Another shot of City Hall, but this time taken beside the fountain in Vauquelin Place. As before, I started with an HDR image based on 3 bracketed shots, but added an extra layer and mask during the processing in PS Elements to over-saturate the bottom part of the image. Again, it was tough knowing where the line drawing part should be.

City Hall pencil drawing
ISO 100 – 13mm – f10 – 1/640 sec (-2ev/0/+2ev)

I noticed that there was a nice big storm cloud in the distance while shooting at Vauquelin Place. I considered shooting with an HDR process in mind, but instead decided to under-expose for a more gritty, threatening look. Since I shoot RAW, I knew it would be possible to recover some of the detail in the shadows if needed, but in the end, kept the dark areas in the lower part as I thought they added to the composition.

Storm clouds approaching Vauquelin Place
ISO 100 – 20mm – f4.5 – 1/2000 sec

The last picture for today’s post was shot next to the flower beds at the top of the steps leading to Place Vauquelin from Champ de Mars. Although the sun was completely in the wrong position, I thought I would try to get a shot of the Montreal skyline with the flowers in the foreground. Despite taking bracketed shots, I decided to play with a single exposure, darkening the left side to help bring out the sun burst, while de-saturating the image…not my best skyline ever, but a bit different.

Sun glare at Place Vauquelin
ISO 100 – 20mm – f5.6 – 1/800 sec

Facebook store now open !

I recently opened up a store on Facebook where each month I will offer new prints and T-Shirt designs for sale prior to them being made available here in the Fine Art print store, or on the Montreal in Pictures CafePress store.

Here is what’s for sale during September:

Would love your feedback on the store, particularly if you are able to view the store on Facebook – I understand the app may not function on some mobile devices :-/

Thanks for stopping by. Until next time.

– Martin

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