This is stunning, like it, good luck. You should post it in Dean's B&W exhibition.

And how is the X-Pro 1 going?

Cheers Kim.

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Very nice composed photo, I love it. Good luck!

Very nice detailed nighttime shot and taken from a good angle. Well done and good luck.

Wendy 

Thanks for the nice comments everybody.

Kim - the X Pro 1 is very nice, I feel rather lucky to own one - had to sell all my Nikon gear to fund it, and I thought I would miss the D300, but this camera was worth it imo. I'll dig around for Dean's B&W exhibition, I'm kinda new on here and not sure what goes on yet...

Thanks and best of luck to all of you who have entered too

Steve 

beautiful scene naturally lending itself to mono.

wow i love the angel on your photo. and the lights from the bridge to. best of luck to you x

Chas (Sunlight) - yep, 70 seconds. 

I used f16 to keep the light glare from the lights nice and crisp, but it had gotten quite dark, so this meant risking burning out the lights too much with a longer exposure, which if you see the RAW files it looks like it could have done with? Anyway, it turned out ok.

Again - thanks for the nice comments and good luck to you all... :-) 

It was 70 seconds on in Bulb mode with cable release attached. I simply pressed the shutter and guestimated the exposure and re-did it a couple of times...

I don't personally go in for HDR. I do 'get' the effect and I appreciate others have a real taste for it, but it's not for me (although I have had a go once or twice). Often it gets taken too far and takes away from the actaul picture itself - people will say "that HDR looks really cool..." whereas I'd prefer to have a picture with over or under exposed elements and people say "that picture looks really cool...". 

Besides, I'm not sure HDR would have worked for this anyway - there were no highlights to expose for and if I'd exposed longer for the dark areas (most of it, it was night after all ) the extreme long exposure would have introduced ugly noise and burnt the lights out beyond even HDR recovery - they would basically have become some very large white halo's. I think my best comprimise may have been to open the aperture slightly, say f11???

Hi

You are probably right. F11 would have halfed the exposure time which would have helped with any burn out of the highlights. I don't know how much work you had to do but the detail in the highlight seem quite good, although I find it difficult to judge these days. It might be interesting to see the tone curve of the original. I have never been able to find out if digital photography suffers from reciprocity failure.

I am still intrigue by how the long exposure was achieved by the camera without exceeding the normal 30 seconds maximum. I understand that digital sensors used for very long exposures need cooling systems. This restriction of exposure time is a frequent question among those attempting night sky photography. Perhaps this camera is the answer.

RAW files are often compared to a film negative and I suppose it is the nearest description you can get, however it is not quite the same when it comes to manipulation of the overall contrast. with film you could deliberately overexpose for detail and reduce contrast by cutting the development time. On high contrast subjects I would aim to overexpose by fie stops and cut development by one third. the resulting negative was dense and flat. Split grade filtering in the enlarger could be used to restore the contrast along with the usual burning and dodging.

As to HDR, I think it can be used subtly so as to avoid the typical HDR look which is unnatural.

This certainly gets a like from me its beautiful the lighting is great sure shows the image of well in this effect good luck for this month

Nice shot ... and beautiful camera (X-Pro1...lucky to have her). Greetings ......Luke