The other day I made my way over to the Boston Arnold Arboretum for an unusual photo excursion. I regularly visit the arboretum during all New England seasons to pursue Nature Photography at its best and most convenience. It is such a fantastic and unique destination for tree, leaf, blossom, or fall foliage photography but this time I was all programmed for skyline photography. Earlier that week my wife and I took a stroll and I used the opportunity to scout Bussey Hill for a suitable location. I had a shot like this in mind for years but was never able to convey it into a pleasing image because the tree canopy was always in the view. This time I found a wide enough opening because early in the year leaves blocking the view is not a huge hurdle. After setting up the tripod and camera I decided to use the Canon 70-200mm lens with a 1.4x tele converter. This combination allowed me to precisely frame the skyline with the Prudential Center to the left, the John Hancock Building to the right, and houses of Jamaica Plain in the near foreground. The long lens combination beautifully compressed the perspective which I desired to make the image work. I manually focused and metered on the Prudential Center to achieve maximum detail in my Beantown Skyline Photography. Once the sun finally set I started shooting at about 1 minutes intervals until the sky turned dark. At one point 4 or 5 geese flew by and the sound of the wings in the dark of the early night gave me the shivers and I thought I was part of the Twilight Saga. Nonetheless, I hung in and captured a few more frames before packing up. At ISO 100, the aperture was set to f/5.6 resulting in a 6 seconds exposure time. In the digital post processing steps I removed dust spots, minimally adjusting lighting and color saturation before sharpening the final Boston Skyline image.
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