How I composed, shot & edited the CEC Palace in Bucharest
Bucharest is full of beautiful old buildings and impressive palaces of all sizes.
One of them is the CEC Palace. Built in 1900 as the new headquarters of the former public savings institute, it's now the headquarters of the CEC bank.
As the building is beautifully illuminated at night, I went there one evening to photograph it.
How I composed the shot of the CEC Palace
CEC Palace is a little challenging to photograph. You don't have much room there.
It's near the city center, surrounded by other office buildings and apartment flats. So taking a photo of the street where it's located with the building in the vanishing line didn't look right. All the parked cars on the road would be visible, and I didn't like that.
The next issue is that the building is enormous. Standing right in front of it, you probably will only get the main portal inside your frame.
However, there's a narrow street, the Strada Stavropoleos, that ends right in front of the building. This low-traffic road was perfect for taking the photo. I just had to take a few steps back and to capture even more of the building inside the frame.
How I shot the CEC building.
The photo is a three frame HDR. First, I took three photos with different exposure compensation settings using ProCamera in manual mode. Most important here was to turn down ISO to at max. 160 to avoid noise in the final photo.
To adjust exposure compensation in ProCamera, swipe over the dial labeled EV +/-. The exposure compensation dial is right above the shutter release button in ProCamera and available for most shooting modes.
If you take that approach, don't even think about trying this handheld. The aligning algorithm of ProHDR X is okayish but won't be able to align three handheld shots like there.
So I attached the iPhone to my travel tripod that I reviewed in the blog and used my Apple Watch as a remote shutter release for ProCamera to avoid even the slightest camera shake.
How I edited the photo of the CEC Building
I combined the three differently exposed photos to an HDR using Pro HDR X. Next, I fixed the crooked lines with SKRWT and finally fine-tuned the shot with Enlight.
2019 Update
In 2019, I re-edited the photo using a single shot from the three exposures using Lightroom Mobile. Specifically, I
- Reduced the highlights to bring out more details in the well-lit areas
- Increased shadows for more details in the dark areas
- Applied quite some clarity
- Tried to reduce the noise in the dark sky a bit without killing too much detail.
So, here's the updated and re-edited final photo
CEC Palace in Bucharest, Romania, shot on iPhone 6s Plus
Today, I'd take a different route to take this photo. A lot has changed since then, especially when it comes to night photography with iPhone.
While you're here, don't forget to check out all the other iPhone Photography Workflow tutorials here in the blog or head over to even more photo spots in Bucharest, Romania. Enjoy!
