Look outside your window
Magic might be happening.

The Photo

I'm not sure about submitting this shot as it's a departure from my normal style, but in the end I decided to as it's a photo of the only time in my life I've ever seen the sky above Lisbon look quite like this.
Besides, it was a refreshing challange for me to get out of my comfort-zone of waterscapes and try and organise this line of houses into a composition which compliments the sky.

It amazed me how when I was taking this shot, lots of people stood and watched what I was doing, but NONE of them looked at the sky, or were particularly moved by one of the most incredible displays of nature above the city that I've ever witnessed.

This shot is a reminder to myself to always look out my window, as every evening brings the promise of a truly magical demonstration of the world's beauty.

A few weekends ago we had a couple of days in Lisbon when the sky at sunset was just breath-taking. I took my last submission [link] during this time.
On the Saturday night I'd stood on the balcony and seen an amazing sunset, but it was too late to get anywhere worthwhile to shoot it. The next day I was busy all day, but when the sky started to fill with clouds around 30 minutes before sunset I wondered where I could get to in the time I had to try to photograph it. The coast was too far and out of the question, but I remembered this place which I drive past often as it's where the motorway comes into the city.

I've often thought about photographing it one day as it catches the evening light, and the location of the neighbourhood called Campo d'Ourique has always interested me, perched on the edge of one of Lisbon's hills. There used to be one of the worst slums in Lisbon clinging to the side of this hill, now at the bottom of the slope there's a sewage plant.

Technique

99% of the technique involved in this shot was being in the right place and being prepared. As I said, we'd had some amazing nights, and I was expecting a good sunset, so I'd chosen a place which I thought would give me an interesting view to put beneath the sky.

I got there with my gear and set up with the sun setting behind me. There were no clouds in that part of the sky and besides, I was hoping to photograph the colours of the buildings saturated by last light from the sun. As it turned out the light wasn't that good and the sun disappeared behind a band of cloud, but I waited as I was hoping that the afterglow would give me some great colours in the sky.

Around 5 minutes after the sun had gone down the clouds above the city started to turn pink and red, and I composed a shot to crop off the ugly side of the hill and just feature the buildings on the hill top below the heavy sky.
Metering from the buildings gave me a shutter speed of 1 second at f8, but the sky was considerably brighter, giving me an exposure reading of 1/30 at f8. That's around 5 stops brighter, which would have made the sky appear washed out, so I used a 3 stop graduated filter to bring the sky back into the exposure latitude of the darker foreground.
The filter was placed at a slight angle along the tops of the buildings.

With the camera on a tripod and a cable release to avoid shake, I took a number of exposure as the afterglow changed the colours.

Post Processing

I really don't like post-processing my work too much, I try to get as much right in camera as possible.
When I shot this I had in mind a panoramic 2x1 crop. I've always been fascinated by images shot from the Hasselblad XPan at this ratio.

This shot needed the shadows lightening a tiny bit to bring out the buildings more, and I've run the shot through Neat Image to get rid of some noise in the top left corner.
There's also been some subtle sharpening to the RAW file for uploading it to the web, and that's it.


Metadata

Taken near Campo D'Ourique, Lisbon
Nikon D80 | Sigma 10-20mm | Nikon Cable release
Manfrotto 190XProB w/ 322RC2 ballhead
Lee 0.9 (3 stop) hard GND filter
1 second | f8 | 15mm

Workflow in Apple Aperture. Frame and title in PS