Night Shooting

Stan

I shot this last week in the French Alps. Absolute darkness. 16 minute exposure.

I would love some C&C in this. I have tried tweaking it in photoshop without any success other than Colour balancing the RAW photo



Thanks
Stan

schmoo

Wow Stan thanks for posting this! Star trails and long night exposures are great, I love 'em, but they take a lot of patience so they don't show up here too often. Well, especially in winter.

I love that long night exposures often look like day, except with much deeper shadows. I definitely see that here. There seems to be a yellow cast to this, and I'd love to see more contrast of the sky between the background and the stars, maybe get a blacker black point in the trees. This is tough to do because obviously you weren't working with a whole lot of light and 16 min exposures tend to get a bit noisy.

Nice to see this kind of shooting this time of year, though. Excellent!

Tango

darker sky with lightroom or something would help, but hey...WHAT A VIEW!

i love the valley glow center point, very nice!

Stan

Thank you Schmoo for the feedback. I did a rough workup to darken the sky. I will try harder. (I don't like the transition between the mountain and the sky) The yellow cast is lights from some small villages at the base of the mountain according to Google earth, although to the eye it really was dark without even the moon.

If you are interested the shot was taken from an appartment in Champagny en Vanoise which is shown as a building site to the south west of the village. Looking South East down the valley beyond Planay.

Aaron thank you for the reply. I haven't got lightroom just CS2. the work up of the colour is what is bothering me. Whether it is over saturated or not.

I'll keep trying but this is the current best



Cheers
Stan

cjmchch

Love it.

pyry

That second attempt looks pretty good already. If you can colour the sky blue and get rid of some of the noise, I think you're there.

Did you shoot this as a single 16-minute shot or stack from shorter pieces?

Stan

Thank you Cjmchch

pyry wrote:

That second attempt looks pretty good already. If you can colour the sky blue and get rid of some of the noise, I think you're there.

Did you shoot this as a single 16-minute shot or stack from shorter pieces?

Thanks Pyry. Looking at some of the other exposures gives the sky more blue and less saturated colour in the foreground. The problem is that when dealing with an unseen image. the beauty is purely in the eye of the beholder. I'm not sure whether I have become blind by seeing too many variations or whether I am not convinced I have seeen the right colour cast.

Definately worth progressing with

Marc Muench

I do like the lighting from the lights in the valley. The sky gets grey because the camera is in a high ISO and there is very little color that time of night. However, I don't believe this is the greatest problem but rather the split composition, half sky half land.
Great location

Stan

Thank you Marc. I know nothing about composition but now you have pointed it out that is the reason the shot doesn't sit comfortably with me.

So much yet to learn

Stan