The past week, Stephen and I continued to work on the Promotional Bulletin Board for the Lewiston, Idaho SkillsUSA competitions.
Recent changes/additions include finalizing the backdrop, working on the foreground, and getting ready to print. We are also starting to think about the speech and q/a.
Once we’re done, I will post the final copy, and possibly all of the steps involved.
–Scott
This past week, Stephen and I have been working on our Promotional Bulletin board design. Currently, we have created a background design as well as the textual designs. We have also brainstormed foreground ideas, and have set in at designing this in illustrator.
We hope to be done with the design phase by Friday, print Monday, as well as work on and practice our speech.
–Scott
Throughout this semester, I have photographed the night many times… seemingly too many; and as I was shooting this assignment, I decided that I was going to do something different. While contemplating other options, I simply decided to go with my shots, and write a tutorial on night photography, and post-processing of said shots.
I am going to divide this tutorial into 3 chapters, with individual steps within them. This first chapter is capturing a great image. I will leave the composition and location up to you… but there are some important aspects of the capture that you should keep in mind. The first is the exposure: while photographing the night, one needs to make adjustments to make sure that an adequate amount of light is allowed into the sensor (or film) of your camera.
ISO
While shooting at night, I like to set my camera to ISO 100. There main reason for this, is noise. While shooting at night (or anytime for that matter), the last thing I want in my images is digital noise. The higher of ISO one has, the more the noise one will have in their photo.
APERTURE
While shooting at night, I like to close up my aperture for two reasons, 1: focusing at night is difficult, so with a closed up aperture, I can get close to the correct focus, and still have most of the picture in focus. This is because as the aperture closes up, there will be a deeper depth of field of focus, making more of the image in focus. 2: It creates light stars. What are light stars you ask? Just look at the image to the right. The bright lights at the restaurant Beverly’s have turned into brilliant stars, instead of glowing orbs of light. For my image, I shot at f/13 to achieve this effect. I would go even smaller, but unfortunately I would have to lengthen the exposure of the image, and I really didn’t want to. Think of it this way… go out at night and look at a rather bright light, and squint your eyes… the light should have a similar effect as to these light stars in this image.
In short, to get light stars in your images, close your aperture to as small as you can go.
SHUTTER SPEED
As a result of closing the aperture and turning down the ISO sensitivity, I needed to compensate the exposure with a looooong shutter speed. And as with any long exposure, one needs to stabilize their camera some how. My stabilization of choice happens to be a tripod… but if you do not have one for your use, you can rest your camera on a stable object. You will get very blurry images if you try to hold your camera no matter how stable you think your arms are.
For my image, I used a 63 second exposure to compensate for the lost light from the f/13 aperture and the 100 ISO.
While shooting, you will have to play around with your exposure until it is just how you like it. It really varies on how much light is available for you to work with.
One last thing on exposure… if you reach a point where you need to have an exposure longer than 30 seconds (the limit for many cameras), you will have to put your camera in BULB mode and either hold the shutter button and time yourself (I use my iPod’s timer), or get a locking remote (some even have timers built in).
The second half of taking night shots, is the post-processing. In this section, I will describe the steps that I took to make the image look like it does above.
RAW
Straight from camera
RAW Settings
When ever I shoot photos, my camera is always in the RAW setting. This enables me to make adjustments that the camera would normally make. Think of it as dark-room adjustments when developing film. If you click on the second image, you can see the adjustments made. Below is the image right after converting from the RAW image.
TOPAZ ADJUST
To the left, you see, there are still some adjustments to be made to make the image look like my final product. You will notice there are 4 gnarly lens flares, the top part of the tower is too dark in relation to the lights, and the sky doesn’t look as cool. So I’m going to do some magic.
First, I used a Photoshop plugin called Topaz Adjust. This plugin essentially enhances details throughout the image. I chose a few settings, including some de-noise, and enhanced the light and color. Once I was done, the result below was displayed.
Although the adjustments did make the image look very cool, I felt as if it was taken too far, and looked too fake. So I brought in the original image and created a layer mask and brushed back some of the first image to take away some of the fakey-ness (new word).
The red areas are where the Topaz is being applied, whereas the blue/purple areas are the original image. I feel that this gives the photo a much more natural look.
LENS FLARE
The next step was to remove the 4 flares from the light. I first went about removing the flare on the far left. This one was the easiest as the sky is pretty much a blurry pattern. So I just used the spot healing brush and Photoshop took care of the rest.
The next one was the far-right flare. This one was slightly more difficult, but still rather simple: I took a rectangular cut of the building just above the flare and pasted it below. Then I faded the edges by masking the layer to make it look natural.
The inner lens flares were taken on by a slightly different approach. For these, I created a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer. From there, I set it to the Yellow mode.
After setting those settings, I created a mask so that the layer would only affect the two inner flares. After making those adjustments, I was finished with the editing of the image.
After editing, saving for the web it the next step. For me, I simply resize the image, apply a border, add my watermark to the bottom, and save it.
Resize
Generally, I don’t ever save an image wider 1500 if it is landscape, or 700 wide if it is portrait – simply to save bandwidth. I use the image size tool (cmd+option+i) and type in my values.
Border
The border that I usually use for my images consists of a black border with a white stripe through it. This is quite simple to make. First, I make sure that my image is flattened, then I enlarge the canvas (cmd+option+c), and I choose the relative check box. Then I make it 6 pixels wider and 6 pixels taller.
After completing that step, I repeat it twice, once with a white stripe of 4 wider and 4 taller, then again with a black stripe of 12 wider and 12 taller. Once I’m finished with this, the border is done. I have created an action of this to speed things up.
Watermark/Name
I always add my name to the bottom of my images so that if someone swipes them, it will have my name on it. I feel it is probably unlikely that my work is stolen – considering that I’m not really the most famous photographer… but it is still a good habit to get into.
First, I create a text layer with my name. I usually use the font Impact set to white. I choose the font size based on what looks best. Once I’m done, I set the layer style to add a stroke of 1 px black (or 2px) and add a drop shadow. These are simply to add to the æsthetic properties of the image.
SAVING
Lastly, I save the image. This really is the easiest step of the process. Simply, I open the save-as dialog, choose jpeg, name it, and choose a jpeg quality (usually 8 for the web).
I hope that this tutorial has given ideas for those wanting to try out some night photography. None of the steps discussed in this tutorial are necessarily required to do night photography, they are simply the steps I used to create this specific image.
Last week, I decided to create a giant panorama of Hayden Lake (map below). I have seen them done, rather spectacularly, of such events of President Obama’s inauguration, and other big events. I have even tried doing it myself in the past of Lake Coeur d’Alene. This one was by far more difficult than the last one though. I decided that I will never do it again, unless I get one of their machines that automates the process.
Essentially, I went down to the Hayden Lake dike, and placed my camera on a tripod and started shooting images from left to right. I ended up shooting nearly 150 images. There was some difficulty at the shoot, from the fact that the lighting was continuously changing, and there were some rather dark areas, so I had to slightly change the exposure. This, unfortunately, caused some difficulties when piecing it together in the computer.
After shooting, I put all the images into Lightroom, and did minor adjustments, and converted it from RAW. This took a while, but I was able to just leave the computer alone as it worked. Then I had to piece it together in Photoshop… which proved to be the most difficult part. The file was so large, it took nearly 1 hour each time to save it.
The next trouble occurred when I realized that the Gigapan uploader has tons of difficulties uploading large files, and always fails. It takes for ever, and always fails.
So, I sized it down from approx. 100,000 px wide, to 40,000 px wide, I was finally able to get it to successfully upload. It took nearly all night, totaling nearly 1gb for the jpeg.
Anyway, I am slightly disappointed as to how it turned out blotchy, but when I attempted to fix that aspect, I realized that it could take months. I tried the Auto-blend tool in photoshop, but I started it at 2:30 pm, and it tried until 5:30 when it failed and gave the message “Not enough RAM.” I nearly punched my computer. I decided that I should just get one of their machines if I want to do more of these.
Dylan Barns, Stephen Sturges, and Chase Lamphier
Last Friday (Jan. 22), was the latest school dance. Once again, our class was able to take photos of students as a fundraiser. As this was not Homecoming or Senior Ball; but the white-out dance, there really wasn’t a demand for photos. Our last strobe-light dance only sold $5 worth of photos for the hours we were there… so we created a new marketing strategy… $1/person/photo. This would essentially make it completely affordable for anyone who wanted a photo. As a result, we made around 6x more money this time.
Furthermore, to save costs, we decided that an electronic delivery method would be ideal. We have received complaints in the past that the only reason people got their photo taken was to post it to their Facebook or Myspace page… but weren’t able to do that with a physical photo given to them. So I created an online event gallery system (which will be released later in Open Source for anyone who needs something similar) which would host the photos for the people to go download them after the dance.
Login screen for my gallery site
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