Double Night

There was supposed to be the northern lights tonight...

I didn't see any. Sad face.

But I did get an interesting shot out of the night!

Some of my co-workers at F-11 and I went out into (insert name of place I don't know) and just played with camera's for a couple of hours. It was a very bright moon tonight, so the landscape was just lit up like day light.

I started shooting at 30s, f2.8 and ISO500. Usually, I have to shoot at ISO800 or 1600 to get any decent shot at night, but it was just so bright tonight!

But I soon got somewhat board of just taking those shots, so I tried something I've never tried before. At least digitally like this. A double exposure. Not a true double exposure, but essentially the same thing.

It took some experimenting to get the right blend, but I settled on shooting one scene for 25 seconds out of the 30s exposure, then quickly turning the camera 180 to get the hill side and the moon. The moon was so bright, and it was in a dark area of the image, so it showed up really well in the exposure. If that made sense?

For double exposures, generally, areas of dark for one exposure tend to show the second exposures better than the bright areas. This is because the dark areas don't have much image data from the first exposure, so if the data from the second exposure doesn't have to compete with much.

Hopefully this will make sense when you see the image. The sky is dark, so when the moon and hill occupies that space it shows up really well because it's so bright.

For editing, I wanted more pop. The colors also were very muted, and I didn't really like them very much. The first things I did were to convert to b/w and then up the clarity a bit. It looked really great at that point, so that's actually all I did. A little noise reduction, but nothing else.

Edit: I added some split toning, with blues to the shadows and orange/yellow to the highlights. Just a bit to add some flair to it.

Now for bed time, enjoy the image.

See you tomorrow!