Night.

Darkness – the absence of light. Our eyes trick us during the night. According to our eyes, there is no light – no color – nothing. Photography opened up a view of the dark world, known more frequently as Night.

The above image was shot on the dock at the Honeysuckle Marina on Hayden Lake in Idaho. It was nearly black, but with the help of a slow shutter speed, I was able to capture the colors of the bay adjacent to the docks. As you can see, the lake has started freezing over due to the incredibly cold weather recently.

Exposure:

• Shutter Speed: 30 sec.
• Aperture: f/9
• ISO: 100

This week, I was feeling incredibly uninspired so I had some difficulty coming up with ideas for this week. So I did the logical thing… I did a motion blur of the US-95 and Prairie Ave. intersection. I drove down to the bank next to the intersection, and busted out my tripod and 50D, set the exposure, and out popped this masterpiece (you can bow to me later, I know, you’re just in shock right now).

Exposure:

• Shutter: 20 sec.
• Aperture: f/22
• ISO: 100

I was experimenting with some new filters this week, so after converting from RAW, I threw some Topaz on this pic and then changed the blending mode to soft light to reduce the effects so it wouldn’t be way too fake. Then I ran some high pass (desatted, on softlight) over the image to give it that nice over-edited look.

Finally, I made a fancy animation, because thats the cool thing to do.

Exposure same as above.

While I was out, I shot a panorama of Hayden Lake. This is below.
View Panorama Larger

This panorama consists of 6 images, taken at 30 seconds each, meshed together with photoshop. Because I was out on the dock at Honeysuckle Marina, there was some slight camera movement in the photo, this isn’t too noticeable at smaller sizes, but if you view it full size it becomes more prominent.

Finally, here is the contact sheet.

Stop Light Before and After