Cityscape Photography - Exploring Every Corner of Jakarta
Jakarta is known as the center of everything in Indonesia, from business centers, lifestyles, associations, necessities of life, even crime centers. Life in Jakarta is a life full of boredom. Departure to your office, school or college will face boring road conditions. In the workplace or school is also boring, even on the way home. About refreshing choice only mall, nightspots, and culinary. Because there are not so many natural attractions.
Jakarta is also a full metropolitan city with skyscrapers, congestion and many vehicles every day. Do you know behind the complexity in Jakarta we can enjoy the beauty of this city through photos. Where are the best locations we can see the beauty of Jakarta with the strokes of light and colors. Be sure not to skip any of my photos in this post! :)
f/8 - 8 s - ISO 100
Things You Need to Know to Shoot Cityscape
In photography, the urban landscape is commonly referred to as Cityscape. Although it can produce beautiful shots, the process of shooting at dusk or night often poses challenges to the difficult situation faced. Be careful, when taking a cityscape that is often done from the height of the building in an open area requires extra caution.
The wind is often blowing hard, and sometimes weather factors like rain and lightning are to be properly anticipated to save yourself and equipment. To be stable when doing Long Exposure in the middle of wind, tripod can be added load like a bag. Usually there is a hook at the base of tripod's foot that can be utilized for this purpose.
f/8 – 13 s - ISO 200
One of the challenges in cityscape photography is balancing the exposure of the sky and objects on land. These two areas often have very noticeable exposure differences, especially when the sun has not fully set. When the sky exposure fits, the exposure ground can be underexposed so that it is dark. And when setting the exposure that fits to ground, the sky can be overexposed so too light.
To overcome this, commonly used accessories are graduated ND filter. This filter reduces light at the top of the frame only (sky) to some extent. Graduated ND filter are available in a wide variety of types, depending on the degree of light reduction and gradation power in light and dark areas. Photo editing software such as Adobe Lightroom also provides a "Graduated Filter" tool that has functions like graduated ND filter. Although its effectiveness is limited due to software-based manipulation. The wider the range of the dynamic range in the camera, the wider the range of tones that can be captured ranging from dark areas to bright areas making it easier to set exposure during editing. Typically, the larger of camera sensor, the wider its dynamic range.
f/16 – 10 s - ISO 100
The perfect time to shoot Cityscape in Jakarta is before sunset until after blue hour is over (when the sky is dark). After the blue hour runs out should stop to shoot because the sky is dark and the residential area of the population as well as the park will appear dark. When forced, the result of the photo becomes less good, because the areas that lack light will look black blocks and lose detail in the area.
f/8 – 2.5 s - ISO 200
f/16 – 10 s - ISO 100
f/16 – 15 s - ISO 100
f/8 – 4 s - ISO 100
f/8 – 2.5 s - ISO 100
f/11 – 5 s - ISO 200
I usually use: f/8, f/11 or f/16. ISO: 100 and 200. Shutter speed adjusts with +/- exposure compensation. White Balance (WB) settings need to be adjusted to natural conditions from sunset to blue hour. Usually when blue hour using AWB is quite safe. However, regardless of WB's choice, it's necessary to ensure that the color in camera is the same or close to the visible nature and color of the building or city according to the original, so that when editing processing doesn't need much to change.
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