Downtown Vancouver, photographed at the blue hour from Spanish Banks Beach near Kitsilano.
Yesterday was an absolutely gorgeous day, so I was eager to get out with the camera. I've been over on this side of the city before, but seldom with my camera, so I figured it was about time. From this point, the city is approximately 4.5 miles away from the camera, so a telephoto lens was a necessity!
The beach at Spanish Banks is very flat, so at low tide (which it pretty much was) there were some areas of dry land and very shallow water -- this provided some foreground interest, with the dry land appearing dark, and then below that some reflections from the city lights.
This was taken a bit later than most of my blue hour photographs (by most people's standards it was pretty much dark), but the lights of the city just kept on getting better and I wanted a shot that showed them really sparkling.
Because it was so dark, I did a 5-exposure bracket to capture more dynamic range. The camera was set at 300mm, ISO 640, f/8, and with exposure times of 0.6, 1.3, 2.5, 5 and 10 seconds.
This is also a crop from the original 120 megapixel 9 photo panorama. I would have preferred even more detail, but I don't have a lens longer than 300mm, and there was some atmospheric distortion which would probably have limited the detail available if I had.
The full-size panorama, covering the entire downtown area, can be seen on Gigapan:
http://gigapan.com/gigapans/123616
Worth viewing large!
I love Vancouver so much