Day Break over Marina Bay Sands

I wanted to photograph the sunrise at Marina Bay Sands but not the normal sight one always see with the sun behind Marina Bay Sands, as this normally resulted in the hotel being a silhouette.

The Day Break

My only window of opportunity was the last Saturday before we return to Shenzhen.

If you are a landscape photographer like I am, then you know how difficult it is to create a special photo with such a small window of opportunity.

And this Saturday was nothing different - we arrived before sunrise but already saw that luck is not on our side - there was no sign of any clouds, which means that we will have a very bland sunrise. But we stayed to take the best photo we can...

I decided that the only photo that will look different will be a photo created in post-processing, and I had an idea. I will take a photo before sunrise and then one after sunrise and combine them during post-processing to create the idea of day and night in one photo.

It was about 30 minutes before sunrise, so I set my camera up with an interval timer to take one photo every 5 minutes for 45 minutes.

It worked, but during post-processing, I decided that the best look is a combination of only two photos - and for that, I selected the first and the last photo.

The Night Scene

I used a layer mask in Photoshop to create the blending from night to day.

The Day Scene

I added the day scene as the bottom layer and added the night scene on top of it. I added a layer mask to the night scene. This was filled with the gradient fill tool so that the right half of the mask is black (hide the current layer while the left half is white (hide the bottom layer).

My Layers in Photoshop

To finalise the photo, I added two levels adjustment layers, one for the day scene (just above the day scene) and one for the night scene (above the night scene but also using the "Create Clipping Mask" functionality to ensure that the adjustment will only influence the night scene).

This is the best I could do with this uninspiring sunrise.

(I posted this also on my Weku Blog today)