But it's back tonight! So I'll attempt to write up the last couple days of photos as best I can remember.
As some of you must know, the other night was a blood moon. This is when the moon falls in the shadow of the Earth, and so the light reflecting off of it is red, like the sunset. It's pretty awesome, and it's really rare so it's a special thing that I don't like to miss.
This weeks blood moon happened at 4AM, so I got up and planned to go shoot somewhere starting about 3:30. Butttttt it was cold out, and I had school that day, so I ended up sitting on my floor with my camera pointing out the window. Which actually worked really well.
I was blessed with a clear night, and the moon came through really clear. However, the double panel window caused some refraction issues, which I needed to solve. Think really really bad lens flares...except that once I threw on a polarizer, everything was better!
Funny story... I had on my 70-300, which has a different filter thread size, so I literally hung the polarizer off the end of my lens...a little untraditional, but it worked!
Exposure was, difficult. It changed based on the stage the moon was in. When it was normal, I was at f11 and 1/60. Really close to sunny 16 rule. A little later, I was at f11 and 1/10, then f5.6 and 1s, then 2 s, then up to 5 seconds at the full blood moon. One thing I messed up on was changing exposures too fast. When the blood moon started, the difference between one side of the moon lit by the sun still, and the dark side was really extensive. I suddenly started exposing for the dark side, and blew out the light side sadly... But oh well. In the future, I'm going to gradually change exposure so that everything still falls within the dynamic range of the camera. In other words, not underexpose or over exposure things. And also so that in sequence shots like I did, there's not abrupt changes.
On to editing. First, I picked out all the shots I wanted. I did a time-lapse, with a shot every 5 minutes, so there were a lot of shots....I picked 6 I liked the most and covered the whole range of what I captured. Then I edited each one to bring out as much detail and fix the over/under exposed parts. Mostly this was done by shadows/highlights adjustments.
Next, I put everything in Ps and set the blending modes to lighten. This let the moons show through the other layers, but since the night sky is black, it turned into one big sequence shot. I had to align the images into a straight line, so it looked like the moon traveled from left to right. I used the ruler feature of Ps to make everything perfectly lined up.
Back in Lr, I raised the clarity (of course) and vibrance a bit. That's all. I tried to keep it looking as natural as possible.
Now for yesterday...what was yesterday...
Ah, yes...my new camera! I just picked up an old Canon AT-1, which is really similar to my AE-1, but different. Not super sure in what ways, but it is. I got it for free too, so I'm not complaining.
This is the third camera I've photographed, so I changed it up a bit. By light painting! I've only done lighting with strobes in the past, so I need something else.
Light pairing objects is way to fun. I found this old, weird dome light that I then used to do said painting. Camera got set to 5 second exposures, and I focused on one area each time. I did the lens, the top, the sides, the front, the bottom. etc. Just getting everything lit in different ways that I could then compile in Ps later. The last exposure I did was 15 s, where I just waves the light around a lot and lit the whole camera. A pleasant side effect I wasn't expecting were the reflections in the lens. These awesome multi colored light trails showed up, and so I had to include them in the final image.
I compiled the different exposures much the same as I did with moon photo. Set everything to lighten, so use layer masks to paint which parts I wanted. Really simple once you get into it. Just takes a little work to get different images to blend well, as you don't want hard lines between layers.
Back in Lr, I did a little tweak on clarity, just a little. And I also painted out the stand the camera was on by using a adjustment brush set to -4 ev.
Now for today.
I didn't know what to shoot, so I literally just walked out of my house with my camera and tripod. I ended up on campus, shooting the fall colors as illuminated by street lamps. Wasn't feeling it though, so I moved on.
Then it hit me, what got my into night photography? I thought back, way back, to the beginning of high school when I got my first DSLR. I was staying over at a friends house, and we were gearing up to play Halo all night long. But I had my new camera, and was playing with it. It was dark out, and I had no idea what would happen if I did a 30s exposure, so I held, yes held, the camera for the 30s.
And was blown away. The world on the camera looked like day, you could see the clouds, the house across the way, the grass. I think that's one of the moments that made me fall in love with cameras.
So in tribute to that, tonight I pointed by camera straight up in the air and took a 30s exposure. No frills, just a photo. A simple, pure, photo.
Editing, all I did was b/w with a little clarity and highlight adjustment. Not much. Just, enough.
See you tomorrow!
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