Twice a year the setting sun lines up perfectly with the street grid of the City of Melbourne. This phenomena has become known as #melbhenge.

In 2017 after a hard day's at work, I shot from a tram stop near Southern Cross Station at the south end of Collins St. I had the street pretty much to myself and grabbed a few shots before heading home.

After the 2017 event it was still relatively unknown, there were only around 160 shots on instagram under #melbhenge.

This year I saw quite a few articles on news sites talking about the alignment, I feel like it's going to take on a life of it's own and become more and more popular. I thought I'd head up to the 'main spot' on the steps of the Parliament building at the other end of Bourke St.

#melbhenge 2017 from Collins St leading into the Docklands

There was quite a bit of cloud cover near the horizon and some trees that partially obscured the sun just as it would have appeared between the buildings. The sky lit up beautifully, but we didn't get the big orange orb sinking beneath Bourke St that we were hoping for!

Still, I did take quite a few shots and I put together the image at the very top of this post which I'm pretty happy with. It wasn't the spectacular sunset I had in mind, but I really like the movement of the tram, the beautiful light coming from the centre of the frame, and the detailed clouds at the top.

The Edit.

The top image was created using these two shots.

The first is with a slow shutter to pick up the movement of the tram. The sky was naturally blown out in that shot.

The second shot from exactly the same spot and time uses a much faster shutter speed to cut down on the light entering the camera, and delivered a better exposed, more detailed sky.

The final shot uses the sky from one image, and the street and buildings from the other to create an image that is not possible in a single frame.

After some initial editing for detail in Lightroom, I combined the shots in Photoshop. I layered the two shots, with the darker sky underneath. Using a mask I painted out the bright blown out sky in the top image to reveal the sky in the bottom image. After flattening them into one layer, I used the Nik collection for final processing.

Define2 for noise reduction in the shadows. For a little bit of detail 'pop': Silver Effex for a 'high structure' black and white mask blended for luminosity and set to 25% opacity, and Sharpener Pro 3 for a bit of output sharpening. Back into lightroom for a touch of saturationin the clouds, and DONE!

Chinatown gate on my way up to #melbhenge 2018

On the way up Bourke St #melbhenge 2018