The Blue Hour In Incheon Korea 10/29/2020

Well, when you are on the other side of the world and you are wide awake because your body knows that it really should be awake, what do you do? In this case, I got out of bed to try and capture some pictures of the park across from the Hotel.

The towering buildings and the abundance of artificial light inspired me to give it a try. The morning was cold. It was about 35 degrees outside. I grabbed the EM5 II and began the trek.

There is a very clean and clear lake at the center of the park. It is surrounded by towering buildings and picturesque landscaping. I started taking pictures before the sun was up and set the camera to aperture priority. I do not remember if I selected the auto iso feature, but the camera was at 1600 iso. White balance was set at around 5500k.

The images were processed in DXO4. I let DXO ad the standard adjustments which included the standard noise reduction settings. That is, I did not do any extra noise reduction work on these images. I also set the color rendering at the EM5 II preset which is provided by DXO.

I normally would not include this many pictures in a blog entry, but I thought it would be a good opportunity for others to see the EM5 II file quality. I did shoot in RAW and then saved the files as jpegs for the blog.

Lessons learned:

I learn a lot every time I go out and point the camera at something. I became more familiar with the EM5 as I fumbled around in the cold. It is the little things, setting the aperture, shutter speed, WB, and interacting with menus. It sounds mundane, but the more you do it, the more you don’t have to search around for a setting when the pressure is on.

I also learn to read light more by going outside. I purposely checked my PhotoTime app so I could be ready to go and shoot from the beginning of the morning Blue Hour to the end of the morning Golden Hour. Watching the scenery, the artificial light, and the natural light change, builds a point of reference in the ol’ brain that I hope will give me more to draw from in the future.