Going for the Gold

Sue had a golden hour prompt to fulfill for her photo group, so Saturday evening took us to the river opposite townhall, which can light up well at that time of day We got there shortly after 7 although, Alexa told us that golden hour would occur between 7:30 and 8:30. There was a longish wait, and I will spoil it somewhat by telling y'all that there wasn't a great version of golden hour that evening. The almost blank sky didn't help.

My first shot is a selfie as we waited on the bench.

People passed by on the bridge. I took a few photos from a distance, but I managed to catch this fellow in the gap right under the flags. I kept him and the flags in volour but turned the rest to b&w. I was just playing. I did a lot of playing with this set of photos.

It was a long zoom with a phone followed by severe cropping
because I couldn't get very close.

I took a short amble the other way from townhall and saw some pretty good light on the Hawthorn factory along the far bank. I liked this composition, but I wisded that the Hawthorne were larger.

I did zoom in more on the Hawthorn in another take (not shown), but I missed the nice foreground of the first photo. So, I put my dubious Photoshop skills to play some more by deciding to try to embiggen the Hawthorn section on the original photo. It's the vey same photo as above, but I just enlarged the building part. I've never done this before, and I think it worked reasonably well. This was primarily done manually. I think it’s a more effective photo with a definite subject beyond the leading line of the trampled grasses in the foreground. 

We continued to wait for the light, and about a half hour later I wandered over that way again and took another shot of the Hawthorn. My playtime with this photo involved adding clouds to make the sky and photo a little more interesting. Sky replacement is another editing trick that I have not used much.

A few minutes later I returned to our spot looking townhall and took a photo of its refection in the water. I then inverted it in edit. I also made a b&w version of this one as you are about to see. 

Sue and I both tried various photos of townhall during the course of the evening, but finally, the building caught some shadows along with the light, so I took this one near the end of our shoot. No, the colour and tonality weren't as good as they appear here, but an image is just a collection of pixels, and it is more than okay to polish them up a bit.