After the sun went down

When I walked on the bridge over the Damsterdiep canal earlier in the evening together with Joey, I noticed the sky looked really nice. There may be some potential for a blue hour shoot later on, I thought to myself. When the moment was there, I grabbed my camera bag and tripod.

This image has undergone some editing... First of all, it's three images merged into one HDR shot. This took care of the huge contrast in the scene: the windmill would otherwise be overexposed and the trees would just be shadow without any detail.

Because the trail of the headlights on the middle right looked really odd in the merged image, I then loaded the merged image and one of the original images into Photoshop and reverted that area back to just that one original image using a layer mask. That looked much better.

Since there is actually a bus stop in that area, there is a bus stop sign and a matrix display showing the arrival times of the next two buses. I thought this looked way too prominent and would take the viewer's focus away from the windmill, so I removed these objects (and their reflections) using Photoshop's AI generative fill functionality.

I'm quite happy with the result and I keep on being impressed by the AI functions in Lightroom and Photoshop.