Night Photography

Contrary to every photo I've taken up to this point, this one took exactly 5 minutes to shoot and 5 minutes to edit.

Crazy right?

I expected to be shooting for a lot longer. I went out to Peat's Hill, a park near campus, and didn't really know what I wanted to shoot. I thought maybe stars, but there were clouds so I ruled that out. Then I remembered this little bench that over looks the northeast side of town and the mountain. I set up the tripod, and started shooting. I initial test shot was way over exposed, my second a little better, and my third was a bit underexposed. It was at that point that I'd just done a bracketed group of shots, and you know what that means...HDR!

Since I was on a trip pod and using a remote, I didn't have any camera movement between frames. So even though they were 30 sec exposers, the camera held still.

When I got into Lr, I used Photomatix Pro to composite the frames into a an HDR. I did a little tweaking back in Lr on clarity and noise reduction, then sent it and my underexposed frame into Ps. I set the underexposed layer to screen, then overlayed it on the HDR. I painted out everything except for myself and the lights around my head from that top layer. The goal of this was to strengthen myself as the subject of the photo.

Note's on night photography.
1. USE A TRIPOD. unless you like incredibly blurry photos, use one.
2. OR use strobes to freeze your subject. This only works with shorter shutter speeds of say...6 seconds or less. any more and the subject fades unless the background is black.
3. Use a low aperture, high(er) ISO and long shutter speeds. but you knew all that, right?
4. Experiment with painting with light. It's incredibly hard to mess up, so just go crazy!
5. Use a remote shutter. It helps, trust me.
6. Know where your gear is so you don't step on it.
7. Get a head lamp.
8. Cold decreases battery life, but makes low noise. I can push 3200 in the cold and take useable photos where 1600 is about the max in the heat.
9. Use a flash light on you subject to focus in Livemode. Auto focus obviously doesn't work.
10. Don't worry about walking in front of the camera, you won't reflect enough light to show up unless you stay still for more than 1/30 of the exposer time.

Anyway, here's the photo for tonight!

If you isn't already guess, the lights around my head are from my iPhone. I used it to illuminate myself and the bench. If you look close, you can see my right arm is raised and holding the light. The reason my arm is faint is because it's moving around to get the light around to illuminate everything. I prefer to use a Maglite as it's way more powerful, but iPhones work.

Camera setting were.... 30 seconds. ISO100, f5.6. The town was so bright I didn't have to bump the ISO at all. There for, I got really low noise and a crisper image. The long exposer does introduce a lot of noise on its own, but far, far less than if I had to go to ISO1600, per se.

That's all for tonight! See you tomorrow.