National Aquarium Waterfall

Today's photo is one of the shots that I had a good feeling about while shooting the scene, and the good feeling got even better as I was processing the shot. If you have visited the Inner Harbor area in Baltimore, you have probably seen the massive glass facade of the National Aquarium, which is where I took this photo. Well, from a bridge crossing over the waterfall scene near the "Australia" exhibit. The shot was not difficult to take, however, it did involve me placing my camera on the slight edge of danger, as I had to balance the tripod on a small ledge of the bridge so I could get the downward looking shot that I wanted, while taking the bridge itself entirely out of the photo. I had to wait about a minute for a small group of people to cross the bridge so I could take the bracketed shots with no vibrations from crossing the bridge, but other than that, the shot itself was fairly easy to take!

I added some extra features using Nik Color Efex Pro 4 and Silver Efex Pro 2, but a majority of the merging with this shot happened from combining the +2, 0, and -2 brackets in Photomatix. The difference between the output from that program and the final processing was not as drastic as I thought it was going to be. I am very happy with the results of this shot, as if I did not tell you where I took this shot, the first guess would likely be some exotic location in a jungle or island setting or something like that, not downtown in a large city like Baltimore!

National Aquarium Waterfall

Please feel free to leave comments and/or feedback below. Also remember that clicking on the photo itself lets you view the image in a variety of sizes by taking you to my online gallery hosted over at smugmug. Thanks for stopping by!