Thank you - I was hoping you might take a couple of snaps ! Very picturesque, probably need to use a tripod and/or faster film and/or... imho Have to admit the only reason I can take anything like a half-reasonable picture now is because I bought an IPhone - obviously use some kind of non-blurry fix thing for older hands etc.
In your opening post the photographer has post processed the image with a heavy HDR (High Dynamic Range) it's a bit heavy handed to be honest but a nice shot. Your shot is good considering the camera you're using and the overall lighting. Here's my over processed version of your shot quickly knocked up in Lightroom, without a RAW file it's not really possible to do a lot but the texture and contrast and highlights have been modified and I cropped it a little for better effect. It's not really possible to do a lot with a realively small file as your post is not the original camera image but it gives you an idea. Personally I'm not a fan of the overdone HDR in the opening post but it has its place in adverts sometimes. I've over enhanced the sky and dropped the shadows too much under the buildings.
It's digital and the image isn't his full size original, daylight and most modern camera's including John's if he's still using the same camera he had a few years ago would expose this fairly accurately and to my eye it's well enough exposed, the sharpness is just due to lack of pixels in this shot and slightly soft corners in the lens at this focal length. When you use an iPhone or android these days you're not really taking a real picture you're using computational photography which takes the light that falls on the sensor and applies a whole load of corrections before it ever records the jpeg or RAW image, they do a remarkable job these days and for most people probably give the best results they will get, I don't carry my professional cameras as often as I once did unless I have a special event that I want to record as best I can as the phone is so much easier to carry.
Another version of your shot super-rezed to make it bigger, sharpened slightly, more subtle adjustments to sky and a fairly major removal of what are called distractions There's a small element of HDR adjustment here as well. The super-rez struggles in the sky hence the sharpening artifacts around the flags and I've probably pushed the sky a bit too far. Also I think slightly over-sharpened although this would work much much better with the original image.
The original is probably a lot better then. My kids both have iPhones sometimes I think the results are quite good it does seem to do better computationally at night shots where it's stacking images (similar to astrophotography stacking) but I've had both of the kids look at pictures I took on my old OnePlus 7 phone and be oooing and ahhhing and covetous of that old phone. I have three OnePlus phones the 7 was really good and I still like the results from it's camera and computation and I'd probably say its results look better than both of the later OnePlus 10 phones that I own in some circumstances but not all.
I accidently left that last variant public on Flickr and you got a fave I don't really get faves these days and most of my content is private also Flickr is a lot lot bigger nowadays than it was back in 2004 when I joined the site so you can be quite flattered to get someone favourating it I've marked it private now and added a note that it's not my picture.
Regards HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos essentially what people had to do in the past was take at least 3 images from a tripod one exposing for the sky, one for the standard general subject matter (foreground) and one for the shadows, so basically -1 stop, 0 stops and +1 stop sometimes -2, 0, +2. In post processing the photographer would run the three images through software designed to merge the three images and would then let them adjust the shadows so there was an unnatural amount of light in the shadows and reduce the sky so that there was much more detail than ordinary cameras could render. When camera sensors started to become isoless (ISO less) (Sony sensors mostly) people were able to forego the multiple exposures and just adjust elements of the photo in post processing because there was so little noise in the RAW image. The problem stems from the fact that most cameras had a range of about 10 bit better cameras about 12 bit and you could not represent tone intensity values of highlights in the likes of the sky so a large part of the sky would basically be blown out i.e. no information to recover from the pixels because huge numbers of pixels all counted the same maximum number of photons that they possibly could. Sony then introduced sensors that were so clean and free of noise that you could expose for the sky i.e. vastly underexpose and then recover the shadows giving you something like 15 stops of dynamic range to play with by contrast the best slide film like Kodachrome had a dynamic range of about 5 stops early digital cameras struggled to give you 8 stops of range without noise. The result always looks slightly fake because the monitors that we view these images on are largely at best 10 bit and the modern cameras can now capture 14 bit values so HDR images tend to look flat. These are some of my very old HDR shots all 18 or more years old with much older camera technology. Glasgow from the squinty bridge the BBC, the Armidillo and the Finnieston crane, this is genuine HDR 3 shots combined, you can see that even with HDR it's nigh on impossible to stop the sun being completely blown out (every pixel fully saturated). This one is the Clyde near where I lived in Langbank, single RAW image reprocessed to give an HDR effect, most of the work is in the shadows. The original unprocessed version (non HDR) And an old shot from the Phils from a Canon 20D which was not known for having a great dynamic range, this image is quite heavily worked on I spent a lot of time on it also removing people from the foreground long before AI could do it for you.
I dinnae ken Glasgow had it's own version of the Sydney Opera house - do they let the fireworks off there New Year ?
Hmmm... very interesting... technology eh. So, very basically, going back to the OP's first photo simply layering two shots (one with the lights on and one with it off) together... would have (could have) produced a similar effect ?
Probably, the Armidillo has been around for a long long time now, but I'm not sure, Glasgow has been complaining about the cost of fireworks displays for a long time as well and I think they've cancelled them in recent years throughout the city. edit: a slightly clearer shot of mine taken back in 2005 the SECC conference centre is behind the Armidilo and that hotel, I'm on the site of the old Glasgow Garden Festival from 1988 when taking this shot, since then they've built the Glasgow Hydro events place to the right and behind of this picture behind the Armidilo, big new concert hall and so on.
Three shots, but yes it has all the hallmarks of HDR, the warm light under the arches is a bit of a giveaway as is the rest of the detail in the shadows and the overall flatness of tone. It's usually the sky that is hard to expose for but if you get the sky exposure correct the shadows could be 6 or 7 stops or more lower, even those shop lights in the arches would have been many many stops lower than daylight. I could of course be wrong and it could just have been really good timing to get the light like that but my gut says that the flatness (evenness) of the light wouldn't give that level of illumination to the buildings and shaded areas. I've processed a lot of images over the years to try and get a wider dynamic range and I'm going on that experience. edit: I'd also say that if the photographer had been using Nikon or Sony equipment they might have been able to get a single raw file that could be post processed to look like that as they can both capture far more dynamic range than older Canon cameras ever could, I'm a Canon guy.
Yes, I was a very techincal photographer, I wasn't a great artist, I worked in Industrial Photography in my twenties, but I learned the basics of composition at the side of my boss Alistair McLucky a great old Scottish photographer who I worked with for 5 years, however it took me decades after that to actually get reasonably good at composing photographs and I still make mistakes even today, the thing is that digital makes experimenting so much less expensive, the cameras and lenses are expensive but the lack of consumables makes all the difference there is no longer the same fear fo the expense every time you press the shutter button. That's a good thing and a bad thing as in my day you had to learn to just look at a scene and work out what the exposure settings should be for that light and the good ones could do that without referring to electronic light metering, it was a skill and it made you hesitate and look at your subject before you clicked the shutter.
