Nighttime Photography Outing

I signed up for a guided tour to the best places for night time photography in Budapest and am pleased with the results. The young man, Miklos Mayer (https://hungaryphototours.com/), took me around on the Buda side of the Danube and clearly knew what he was doing and was very comfortable with the problems that came our way, as I will describe below.

In the image of the Erzsébet híd (Elizabeth Bridge) above, you not only see the city spread out on either side of the river, but you see the traces of the river boats as they moved while the shutter was open.



Process that image was quite a struggle on my laptop. It is the combination of 32 images from my GFX-50R. The raw file come in at about 35-40 Mb. To stack the images to get the final result of the long streaks for the moving boats, I export them as 16 bit Tiff files to Affinity Photo. These files are about 210 Mb. Once the final images is produced, the trick is to output it in a sensible format. For me, this final image is jpeg. Try as I might, I could not get it to output anything. Just not enough memory. So I finally rebooted with no applications and all extensions off, and created 6 stacks, each showing a portion of the boat trails from 5-6 shots. I then opened these 6 and output the final image. Total time: about 2 days to figure it out and get it done.

Below is the Victory Bridge (Szabadság Híd). I like the way the lights on the bridge produce enlarged shadows of bits of the bridge (especially the inverted lamp on the right side) in the surface of the time-averaged water surface. 

We started taking photos from the top of the hill where the Citadel sits and walked down to various lookouts. From one of these lower vantage points, we get the image of the Victory bridge below. Now we can see all the light trails from the cars and trams coming and going.

Our next stop was the castle hill but there was a problem. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, was visiting Viktor Mihály Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, on this day. This created all sorts of confusion on the streets and the metros. It also closed the castle hill where the prime minister has his office. After my guide had several conversations with the police (I stayed back and avoided eye contact) we learned that the closure would be lifted soon, so we waited. We did get in and took all the shots we sought, but the interaction with the police was not something I'd have ever done alone.

From the castle hill, we get a nice view of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge (Széchenyi Lánchíd) and Szent István Bazilika on the right and the Parliament (Országház) on the left.

Here, I also got a shot with the boat plying the river's waters. You can tell that this is multiple exposures by noting the small gaps in the light trails. the length of each light trail between gaps also gives an indication of the speed of the boat.

Over closer to the bridge, we can see the traffic circle on the Buda side that sorts out travelers to their various destinations.

And from a foot bridge over the funicular that climbs the hill to the castle, we were able to get exactly lined up with the bridge and make a nice symmetric shot of the bridge, the traffic circle, and the passing boats.

The last stop of the evening was the Országház. We were fortunate that no boats were tied up between us and this impressive building so I could get a nice symmetric shot of the entire building and it's reflection. A nice way to finish a long and productive evening.

Lots of walking and good conversation with my guide. A great evening out and some fun images. I learned some things that I'll definitely be trying again. I highly recommend that you contact Miklos for a day or night photo tour when you visit Budapest.