Alex Noriega.'s photostream  

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A stormy April afternoon in western Colorado, just east of Grand Junction. Mount Garfield is to the right just out of the frame.

Explored 4/27/2011 #28.

My Double Arch shot competes with this for my favorite of my work, but this one probably wins out.

Pushed to the front of my photostream because it's my favorite, and I just finished a more dramatic and clean re-edit.

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Here's an explanation of the process of making this shot, since I get a lot of questions on it:

Tech info/equipment:
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Canon 40D
EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17mm (27mm FF equivalent)
Manfrotto tripod+head
Knockoff TC-80N3 Intervalometer
Coleman LED flashlight
Foreground/arch exposure: 7 minutes, ISO 400, f/4.0, 6500K WB
Sky/star exposure: 30 seconds, ISO 3200, f/2.8, 4250K WB

Technique:
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The arches were light painted from behind the rocks you see near the bottom of the frame - they get a lot more shape/texture from side/backlighting as opposed to painting from straight on. After laboriously looking through the 40D's tiny, dim viewfinder to explore possibilities and compose in pitch blackness for over an hour, only seeing small spots of light at any one time from my flashlight, I finally focused on the arches via flashlight/Live View and set the long exposure timer on the intervalometer.
I gave myself a 1 minute delay to go climb behind the rocks and lie down. After light painting along all the rocks for 7 minutes (with a smooth back and forth motion, making sure to spend more time on the larger arch because it needs more light to cover more area), I came back to immediately do the 30-second milky way exposure, being careful not to move the camera on the tripod at all as I refocused at infinity (a setting I had previously tested and memorized for the 17-55 at f2.8).

Editing:
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Since my LED flashlight was a fairly cool color, I had to process the arch RAW at a fairly warm 6500K to compensate and restore the redness of the rock.
To get the bluish look to the sky, I went with around 4250K for the sky RAW. Then I manually painted a mask to blend the two exposures in CS5 by hand, with a 90% hardness brush (which took hours to get pixel-perfect). The sky layer (as with any Milky Way shot) needed a pretty strong contrast curve to bring out the stars and galaxy. I also did noise reduction on it using ImageNomic's noiseware plugin, and then re-sharpened it with a 1-pixel high pass overlay to bring the stars back out.
I also had to remove some trails and flares I left with my flashlight at the bottom (because I counted the 1+7 minutes too fast in my head before coming out behind the rocks) by cloning and masking in part of a previous rock exposure. Then it was just balancing the colors/saturation in the sky and arches to make it look beautiful yet natural.

Interesting addendum:
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- These arches are HUGE, and the photo doesn't convey their size. It's awe-inspiring to stand below them - the foreground arch has a span of 148 feet, and a height of 104 feet.
- I think the most interesting thing about photos like this is thinking that when the light left those stars, these arches didn't exist. As the light made its journey to earth over millions of years, water slowly eroded the rock away to form the arches.. crazy.
- Being alone in pitch blackness in wilderness you've never seen in daylight is scary. Especially when it's dead silent, and you hear even the SLIGHTEST sound (like your winter jacket scraping against the rocks), and you saw a sign warning of mountain lions in the parking lot..

Pushed to the front of my photostream because it's my second favorite shot of mine, and I just finished a cleaner, sharper re-edit.

A foggy night on the Mississippi, below the Stone Arch Bridge.

Take two.

Minneapolis, Minnesota.