So, tonight I went out Springhill Rd on the west side of the Bridgers, about 3/4 of the way up the range. Or something like that, I went pretty far. The original plan was to just take star pictures, but then I thought about the moon, and how bright it was. First, I thought it was a problem, because talking pictures of stars would turn out to be really washed out and bleh with the bright moon. But then I realized that since the moon was so bright, wSo
Tonight though, was very successful even though it's not the most interesting composition. I pulled up rather randomly on the side of the road, and just took pictures from there. From the spots there were, it probably wasn't a bad choice, but maybe could have been better. The mountains form a really like double peak thing, with a valley in the center that leads into a star trail and then the moon. I cropped some of the bottom off a bit, just to get rid of the excessive amount of grass in the foreground. Plus, the longer aspect ration really works with the composition. Could even be a desktop picture, maybe. It is 16x9...
For exposure calculating, I started with a 30s test at f3.5 and ISO400. That turned out to be pretty much right on, so yay! Given those values, I knew I could drop the ISO and stop down to get a better, sharper image and still have enough light to not need a ridiculously long exposure time. But the exposure would be long enough that I'd get some star trails in there! Win, win!
To get to ISO100 from ISO400, that's two stops. From f/3.5 to f/11 that's about 3 stops. So five stops overall. Starting from 30s, I need to make five stops brighter, so that's 1min, 2min, 4min, 8min, 16min. I really should be at 22min for the extra 1/3 stop that's between f/3.5 and f/4, but that's not really worth it I think. It can be done in Lr really quick with not much degradation to the image. I would lose some good star trails though....but it was cold and I was pressed for time. Another day!
For editing, I started by making that 1/3 EV adjustment, then upped the clarity and shadows just a bit. Then I brought down the blacks a bit, just to get the richness back for them.
I've been playing around with camera calibration a bit lately, which is pretty useful actually. I went through the presets, and I really liked how the landscape one worked with the image. I did tweak the reds a bit to make them more orange, but mostly the color is from that preset.
Until I went into the color adjustments and made the oranges more yellow, and made them brighter. The image was just a little flat, and there is so much yellow orange that just brightening it would really help the image.
So, moral of the day. If it's full(ish) moon, go out and shoot landscapes! They will be awesome.
See you tomorrow!
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