The blue hour in Salzburg

I'm just starting two back to back tours in Austria and then Switzerland. This is a unique vantage I found in Salzburg, Austria that captures the classic beauty of the city. The blue hour is the most beautiful time to photograph architecture and skylines. Usually photographers don't use HDR at this time of day. But the reason you can see all of the detail in the trees, instead of them turning into black silhouettes, is because I took a 7-frame HDR sequence of images. The more contrast in the scene, the more frames are required to show all the detail. I photographed this scene handheld, resting the camera on a railing. The software in the camera miraculously aligns all of the images into a perfect composite. Because noise is random, when the 7 frames are composited together it disappears even though I used a high ISO --12,800 in this case. I used a 24-105mm lens at f/4, and the shutter was 1/60.