I got lucky last night!

OK well not THAT kind of “lucky” but that’s not a subject for this blog. (My last post was titled, "The Earth Moved...". Anyone detect a common thread here?)

I set out to shoot a picture, researched it, planned it, set it up... and it didn’t work. But in the process I kind of got an image that I like! This is kind of a long tutorial on the thinking that went into the shot. It might give you some ideas about how to do similar shots and some pitfalls to avoid. But if you’re not a photographer, or you want to avoid having to read through a bunch of stuff before scrolling down to the image, here it is: enjoy.

As usual you can click on the image to view it larger. You can also see it in my gallery at Smugmug where high resolution prints are available for sale at very reasonable cost.

Here’s the thing. I was in a ‘celestial’ mood after that eclipse event. I got home last night to a clear, starry night and thought, what’s the longest exposure I ever did? I checked and I think, around 80 minutes. Nice long star trails, but I saw an image a couple of days ago with much longer trails and I think the maker said it was a 4 hour exposure, so I set out to do one.


What settings? I looked at my earlier work and saw settings like ISO 100, f/8. So, I though, how can I go wrong by just stopping down a stop to f/11 and shooting for a longer time? I can always tweak it in Lightroom or Photoshop to adjust the exposure as long as I’m reasonably close.

What lens? Since I wanted to see a really big area of sky, the simple answer is, my wide angle. I decided to go whole hog, and cranked my 12-24mm to its widest setting.

Physical setup: Do I have to say, locked down solid on a tripod? I used my big Gitzo for greatest stability. Last time, my pictures came out on an angle because it’s hard to aim in the dark. So I set up the tripod in the house, levelled the camera and pointed the lens at the sky. Not straight up – I wanted some terrestrial objects in the picture.

That’s important, by the way. Star trails are neat but if you don’t have anything else in the picture, well, they’re boring.

I attached my cable release, put in a fresh battery, preset the exposure to “Manual – Bulb” and f/11, ISO 100, focused to infinity and turned off autofocus. If this lens had a VR setting I would have turned it off too. Then I bundled up in my sheepskin jacket and boots, threw a little flashlight in my pocket and trudged out to where I wanted to put the camera.

Next challenge. Where? I don’t have the ideal property for this. There’s only one place on my property where I get a reasonably clear view to the North and that’s behind the garage. Trouble is, you can also see the highway from there. I thought, I wonder what it’ll look like if cars drive by – will they pollute the light or create reflections on the lens? I thought I’d test this first, so I changed the camera settings to f/4, ISO 1000 temporarily, so I could take a couple of test shots without having to wait an hour to see them. I did a few 30-second shots. Having the flashlight with me was a good idea... well yes, there was a definite trail of light, way overexposed at the bottom of the image, no detectible splash on the rest of the picture, and I could crop that off. OK, reset to the long exposure settings. Besides, each car going by was only going to be in the frame for a few seconds and I was at f/11.

By the way, the Inn across the road keeps their big parking lot light on all night. I’ve talked to them about it, they agree it should be turned off, but haven’t done it yet. That’s why I had to go behind the garage. I could take my camera down to the dock but I don’t think I’d want to leave it there unattended for several hours, although I could put it where nobody would see it. Besides it’s a long walk in the cold.

So far, so good, right? Anyone catch on yet to what the problem was? Give yourself a brownie point if you did. Well here it is...

I set it up, locked the shutter open and went back inside to sit by the fire and enjoy my evening. It was 7:30 when I put it out, and I figured 11:30 when I would go out and retrieve it. Some time a couple of hours later, I thought, hmmm. The way Noise Reduction works on the Nikon is that it hums and whirs for the same length of time as the original shot, creating a null image (it doesn’t actually take a picture) and then it electronically merges the two images, subtracting any noise or artifacts generated internally in the camera from the picture. Ideally this should be done under the same conditions as the original picture, which means leaving the camera outside, chugging away for 4 hours. I could bring it to my back porch though. But then, it would be 3:30am before I could bring it in. I wimped out. At 10:30 I decided enough was enough, and I went out to get the camera. I got there, unlocked the shutter release and... NOTHING HAPPENED.

AHHHHH! Is my camera frozen? No... the battery was dead. It turned out that the battery lasted almost exactly 2 hours in -12°C temperatures. And that also meant, NO NOISE REDUCTION. It had shut down. {sigh}.
I brought everything inside (I took the CF card out and put the camera in an airtight drybag with outside air, to warm up in a dry environment. I’ve written about this before) and plugged the card into the computer. Hey.... not bad!

OK, I looked at the image and really wasn’t too excited about the distortion caused by pointing a wide angle lens at an angle. I tried perspective cropping to straighten things up, but nah... even the North star wasn’t a ‘point’. There were a bunch of little red and blue and white speckles all over the place – that’s the noise I couldn’t cancel. The trees were kind of neat, but the car trails and the barn at lower left which was distorted and overexposed were not, shall we say, pleasing.

Here’s the original image

So I ended up cropping it. I did use Topaz, two different ways. I played with some extreme effects and ended up using a ‘simplify’ setting, then played with saturations and came up with this one:

The final picture, which I showed you first, actually did contain a bit of ‘topaz’. I wanted to use the smoothing, simplify effect, but I wanted to bring out the star trails which got reduced by the filter effect. I liked what it did to the trees, though. So I added a layer mask and added a radial gradient on the layer mask centered on the North star which masked the entire Topaz-adjusted layer in that area. Back to Lightroom for a final crop, and we’re done.

So I got lucky. I thought of everything EXCEPT battery life. If I really want to do long time exposures, I have to find a way to power the camera externally, something I’m going to explore and report on when I figure it out. The other issue was the distortion which I think I can only fix by centering the image on the North Star or using a longer focal length lens. More stuff to think about!

Next: I have some saved-up topics but the moon and the star trails posts were too long to include them. I have some pictures of my new car, some frozen waterfall and mountain stream pictures and a neat HDR I’d like to show you. Later!

Did you miss me?

After I finished the fourth Lightroom article, I had to pay some attention to other things. So I haven't posted in a while. A few things did happen in the meantime...

Note: I added this little section after the fact. I had a few calls about the Lightroom articles so I wanted to make a quick response here. The articles don't "Teach" LR. They just summarize a few of the features and pitfalls for thos contemplating getting their feet wet in LR or who are new at it and are lost. The articles are supposed to be read in order, 1 to 4, but the nature of this blog means that they're posted in reverse and in fact, the first article has fallen off the bottom. Here's what to do: click on February in the Blog Archive at right (not in the screen capture below!)  to expand it, then click on the article itself, starting with #1 at the bottom.,

It's nice to be recognized!

Remember the "Mountain Man" image? It seems that some other people liked it as well. In fact it was awarded "BEST PORTRAIT" in the Digital images category at the 2010 GTCCC (Greater Toronto Council of Camera Clubs) Interclub competition. Yesssssssssss! Several people congratulated me, and a couple of them remarked, "OK, so isn't it time you got back to doing some painting? One of them was Hilarie who taught me in the first place. I need to make the time to focus on it and I will. In fact, I have an image in mind that I'd like to work on... news at 11. Which means later. I'm going to make a larger print and get it framed. When the same image won the Richmond Hill print competition last year, I won a free picture framing. If I can still find the award (hmmm. It's somewhere in my computer room!), I'll get it properly framed for display. It's getting hard to find space to display all my award-winning shots! LOL

I wasn't the only one to win an award at the GTCCC's. Irina Popova, Lance Gitter, Fern Gitter, Bud Newton, Robert Fowler and many other RHCC members won awards as well. Hilarie, who I mentioned above, won 4 (four) awards! Including First Place overall in Digital Pictorial. Click this link to look through some really fine examples of the art of photography.

Why I don't shoot pictures for a living
Last week a business colleague/friend asked me to shoot his picture for a business card. I was dumb not to ask how he wanted to use the picture. I came to his house, spent an hour or two shooting then a couple of hours editing before I posted the pictures on Smugmug for him to select. He told me which one, so I spent a couple more hours carefully editing and preparing the picture.Then he emailed me and said, "oh by the way, I want it floating on a transparent background. So much for my careful vignetting of the background. Out comes the old "Extract" tool in Photoshop (which isn't in CS4, you have to go find and download it), and about an hour later I had the close-cut image. Less than perfect, because had I known in advance, I would have chosen a background easier to select from. Then I get, "it appears a little dark...". So I've got to have 5 or 6 hours into this picture, which I'm doing as a favour for free. That's why.

I haven't been shooting pictures.
But that doesn't mean I haven't been doing photography stuff. Sometimes planning shoots and studying other photographers can be very productive too. I ran into photographer Lyn Winans in Minden one day last week. We chatted for a while and exchanged contact information. When I got home, I surfed over to her gallery site and was very impressed with her work. About 300 images up there, and each and every one of them is tack sharp and really well composed. Many of her shots had the "wow" factor that we all strive for. I won't post her pictures, of course but have a look at her gallery. My favourite of her images is this one.

I also invited Dr. Ron to shoot the annual group picture of the Humber College instructors. In previous years, I would set up the camera and run into the picture, which was good for a laugh. But I felt I was getting stale and didn't want to shoot the same shot year after year, so I asked Ron. I gave him a guideline or two, then left it to him. I have to say that I learned a few things — Ron has vision, different from mine (notice I didn't say "better". Ron would disagree with me if I said that but I would be right and he would be wrong. So there.) Anyway, I can't post those pictures here, because they're not ready. I'm sure he'll allow it but you're just going to have to wait and see! There's also an instructor at Humber by the name of John Kerns who is a superb photoeditor so he's going to do that part of the project!

Told you I haven't been shooting.
So this is the fourth topic in the post and still no pictures. Huh. See? Would I lie to you? I shot the FAC course ID photos last weekend and proceeded to drop my flash on the floor. Now it doesn't work (surprise, surprise!). So I need a new one. SB-600 or SB-800. We'll see what I can find at a reasonable price on eBay. So I had to shoot those photos and all I had was the popup flash on the camera. Yuck, to say the least. I duct-taped the Gary Fong diffuser on top of the camera. It helped, but I got some really ugly shadows. You do what you have to do. By turning down the clarity, I got some sort-of acceptable images. So I have to fix or replace that flash quickly.
 
Here's a typical shot with the pop-up flash and diffuser. Before and after clarity adjustment.
 

I think the clarity slider is a great invention.

All right, I lied.
OK, I did go out last week and shoot some photos. However not really with the intention of creating a world-beating image, at least not now. Again, I have an idea about what I want to create and I don't know quite how to do it so I went out to practice. Here's the deal.

I told Dr. Ron that I am contemplating returning to Newfoundland again this summer. We discussed a photo expedition that I was looking into and I told him I had decided not to go with them, for a couple of reasons — first, I looked at the work of the expedition guide and I don't think he has that much to teach me. Second, it's expensive and I could do pretty well everything he was going to do for much less. I told Ron that I had a photo in mind that I wanted to take. He said, "you're going all the way to Newfoundland to get one photo? That's nuts!" This after he told me he hiked 30 miles with a 4x5 camera for 2 pictures. We both realized that this is what it can be all about.

Do you think I'm rambling? Not really, I'm leading up to something. I'm trying to tell you, dear reader, that there's nothing wrong with getting an idea in your mind then going to extremes to achieve it. I want to take a night time exposure involving the sea, some rocks and if I'm lucky, an iceberg. The iceberg thing may not work because they move, so that would screw up the time exposure thing, but I might be able to capture it separately and post-process it together. Anyway, I've got a vision of what I want to capture and a vague idea how to do it, so I have to try it before I go.

I went down to the lake at night and captured this shot of some fast water coming out of a culvert:

Nope. Didn't even come close to working. How do you focus in the dark?

While I was there, I took these so-so interesting images:

Not a forest fire – house lights through the trees

The house across the lake. Tough exposure!

Star shot. The belt of Orion.

I went to the Minden Wildwater Preserve and did some exposures with heavy duty Neutral Density filters in place. I actually managed to do a 1 minute exposure in daylight. Now we're getting somewhere, but it's not ideal. The lens was stopped WAY down to f/32 which doesn't produce the best sharpness (see an earlier post about diffraction effect. Search for "aperture") and all that extra glass on the front of the lens... but the result is getting there. I just need to know how to do this in the dark! Here's the best shot that day:

1 minute exposure at f/32, 100 ISO. I used the 24-120mm lens with an 8xND filter and a polarizer mounted for additional light reduction. As an aside, I remembered to turn off the VR but I didn't remember to turn it back on until just this minute!.

So what am I trying to tell you? By setting a goal and figuring out how to get there, I think I'm taking a step forward. It remains to be seen if I can capture that image I have in mind. I'll be disappointed if I don't but at least I'll have tried.

PS: anyone want to come to Newfoundland at the end of June? Email me.