Stars in the Sky

Went on a spontaneous water gathering trip up Sourdough tonight. Some of my friends were heading up so I just tagged along with them and got some pretty awesome tasting water from the river...and a cool picture.

This was the very first picture I took up there. Just slapped the fish eye on, put it to my regular night exposure settings (30s, 2.8, ISO800) and it turned out almost perfect. It was a tad dark, so I had to fix that in post but it was pretty cool composition! I took it just from the road so there's that perfectly clear path down the middle with amazing trees on either side. This was a half conscious decision, and half just me picking the easiest spot.

There's not much to say about this photo, it wasn't a snapshot, it just happened to work out perfectly on the first try!

In Lr, I made it into a fake HDR from the Raw file. To do this, you just raise the contrast, lower the highlights and whites (but not too much for this since the whites are the stars), raise the shadows and blacks, and then pump the clarity a bit. Pretty simple. Just compresses the tonal range of the raw file so you can see it all.

I applied a lot of noise reduction to this image, and a lot of sharpening as well. It needed it. I furthered this in Ps with a high pass sharpening layer.

Finally, I used a adjustment brush to bring out the stars more with adjusting the clarity, contrast, highlights and shadows a bit.

That's is! This was a pretty minimal edit. Which turned out pretty great :)

See you tomorrow!