lightopia's photostream

Similar to the previous photo, but a single exposure with a light trail.

I had finished the main shooting and started making some photos using my flashlight. In this one I opened the shutter for a 30 second exposure and ran down the beach away from the camera pointing the flashlight a little backwards and towards the water. I wasn't really trying to light any specific features, just trying not to trip over a rock or driftwood and fall down. The wavy light bar with the spots of light on the ground worked out well and I was lucky to illuminate the two large rocks on the beach.

The lighting on the top of the bluffs is from the moon.

This is from a single RAW image with two different renders, one for the sky and another for the bluffs and beach. They were blended together in Photoshop.

In an earlier attempt to photograph The Beehive in Maine's Acadia National Park under moonlight I used a relatively short exposure so the stars don't appear to move, they are just dots in the sky. I decided that I wanted to make a photograph with light from the moon and star trails; since Acadia is twelve hours away I made a trip with friends Dan O, Dan K, Marty, and Bob to Chimney Bluffs. Initially it appeared that the trip might be a bust since there was very thin cloud cover, almost a haze, that I believed would make the contrast between the stars and the sky too low. However one of the lessons I've learned (and it took me a long time to learn) is that you follow through with the plan because even if everything doesn't seem perfect there can be unexpected success.

In my previous test photo I found that setting the camera to ISO 1600 with a 30 second exposure at f2.8 would yield day-like results for the parts of the picture lit by the moon. I set the camera for that exposure and began making successive exposures ending up with 83 photos (about 45 minutes).

For post-processing I used Canon's DPP application to create 83 rendered images for the sky and 83 rendered images for the ground from the RAW files. The ground and sky used slightly different parameters during rendering, I wanted the sky to be slightly darker and the ground a little lighter. I used my homemade "stacking" program to sandwich each of the sets of 83 together so that I ended up with a single final image for the ground and for the sky.

In Photoshop I combined the two images together. Then used a third image for the photographers in the lower right.

The Milky Way rising above Great Head on the coast of Maine. I was at this location to make a landscape photo of The Beehive by moonlight (final image of that coming soon I hope) when I noticed that between sunset and moonrise there was a good opportunity to photograph the Milky Way in the East. I quickly turned the camera around on the tripod and made this photo. In the final image here I removed a couple of light trails from planes and adjusted the color temperature slightly. The exposure was 60 seconds at f2.8 - ISO 1600.

The constellation Orion above the hillside where we saw deer running at sunset.

Hundred Acre Pond shore lit by moonlight with the Big Dipper in the sky.