Night In the Forest

Last night and morning, I went in the forest and took some night/sunrise photos! I've been out to the lake at sunset before a lot, but never at sunrise. The lookout faces east, so its a prime spot to watch the sun come up.

This first shot was taken late at night just before the clouds started to come in. There was about an hour window just when it got dark enough to shoot star pictures before a big cloud bank mucked everything up. But luckily, I got everything I needed well before that hour was up. Even though it seems as if you have tons of time to shoot at night, I find it's always to your benefit to not dawdle.

Backing up a bit, before I went out I had a debate with myself wether or not to bring the fisheye lens. And of course I decided not to, and of course I ended up wanting it. Funny how that always happens. There's such a fine balance between packing light and regretting not bringing the one thing you really need.

So anyway, I had to make do with what I brought, which was my 18-135mm lens. A 18mm is still pretty wide, so I decided to just do a big, sweeping panorama. I hadn't done one of those in quite some time either, so it was fun to do one again. In the past, I've done them to get that wider field of view that I couldn't get with the 18mm. To further change things up, I shot with the ISO all the way up. Yes, that's right, all the way to ISO6400. There was so much noise, I didn't even know how to handle it. Except for converting into b/w of course! Because that's always a wonderful way to cover up shooting at super high ISOs.

I also thought shooting in B/W gave the photo more of a summer feel than color. Seems counterintuitive, but at that moment it just felt like the right thing to do.

To set up the shot, I did 30s, ISO6400, and f3.5. Maximum light entering camera. Then I just turned it to portrait orientation, and took a normal panorama.

Editing was also a little different. I did my final edit of the picture while they were all still individual. This is because I then exported to jpeg and used PTGui to make the panorama, because you have way more control with that program than with Ps panoramas. The adjustments I did in Lr were, convert to b/w, up clarity, whites, and exposure a bunch. The image was a bit dark. I also lowered the highlights a bit so that the stars would stand out more.

Then five hours later, we got up and watched the sunrise! That was pretty amazing as well, there's nothing like hanging out with good friends all night watching stars and the sunrise. and eating lots of gummy bears.

For the sunrise, I set up my camera to Av mode at F22 and IS0100. I wanted to get long shutter speeds and very sharp images. The low ISO and high aperture got the sharpness, and the long shutter that resulted from that blurred the water, clouds, and fog over the water beautifully.

In Lr, I exported the bracketed sequence to Photomatix Pro and make a couple of different versions. Just tweaked settings here and there to what I liked. I also made a couple versions of another sequence I'd shot from exactly the same position a few minutes before.

Then in Ps, I merged all these versions together into one mega awesome photo. I like the sun and clouds from the first sequence, but the colors in the water and plants were better in the other photos. So I selectively chose what I wanted using layer masks. Worked out pretty well. A little over HDR, but that's okay. I still like it :)

See you tomorrow!