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.

CHAPTER I: Capturing the image

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).

CHAPTER II: Post-Processing

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

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.

CHAPTER III: Saving for the Web

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.

Center of map

Hayden Lake Dike

Location of camera

Honey Suckle Marina

Left side of image

Hayden Lake Marina

Right side of image

Surrealism: a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential ofthe unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.
Oxford American Dictionary

This week’s project has proved to – quite possibly – be the most difficult project to date. Unfortunately, with all of the work, it is still not my strongest work.

I started out my search for inspiration at Worth1000.com, a site that hosts Photoshop competitions which lead to lots of surreal photos. While browsing, I found an image that was utterly stellar, Kitty Attack. This image was so inspiring to me, and being a cat person, I decided to try to replicate the image in my own way.

The first step was for me to find an image of a bridge. For the original image, they chose the Golden Gate Bridge, but as I had no plans to travel to San Francisco any time soon, I felt that was out of the question – and it would really feel too much like copying. Where I’m from, North Idaho, there is a rather large bridge that spans over Lake Pend Oreille in Sandpoint, ID that is 1.3mi long. This bridge is rather famous among locals here, so I logically chose that bridge for the shot. Unfortunately, I was unable to get a superb image of said bridge, so I tried another bridge adjacent to the original one. Although it was not the well-known one, it is very similar in looks. Below is my shot for the background of the image…

The image is actually composed of three individual exposures to get a good look to the image. The sky was totally blown out if the bridge was exposed correctly, while the water was dark. So I took three exposures, each exposed for the three main elements of the photo: the sky, the bridge, and the water. I combined these in Photoshop and this set up the background of the image.

Next, I started adding some destruction to the image: First, I moved some of the pylons down into the water, then warped the elements of the bridge, and finally, I collapsed a main portion of the bridge. I originally looked on the internet for tutorials on how to create ruins from images and came across this tutorial on how to make Modern Ruins, but was unable to do most of the stuff in the image due to lack of destruction in Coeur d’Alene. But I was able to use some of the techniques and inspiration from the tutorial.

After I finished totally annihilating the bridge, I went to photograph my cat, so he could be doing the destruction. From my experience, felines really do not make the best of models. They really resist anything to do with sitting when told, and doing the things you ask them (even if you ask nicely). Then when you add in strobes, they just totally go ballistic. This was no exception. I chose my cat, Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov, to do the modeling. At first he totally resisted, but after I introduced a food bowl, a toy, cat treats, a green laser pointer, and another human to restrain him***; he cooperated. Below, you are able to see both cats lazily chilling there.

After coaxing my cat to be playful with string, laser pointers, and other toys, he cooperated for about 30 seconds. I finally got some good photos. Below is the image I chose for the project.

Once I edited the image in Photoshop, I was able to place it into the document. I placed him behind the bridge, and did some really difficult and time consuming masking to get it to look like he was both behind the bridge, and partially submerged in the water. Below is an image of what it looked like after I added the cat.

Now that the main elements were in the image, I was able to make the cat do some very evil things. First, I added some green burning lasers coming from his eyes to give him laser vision. I aimed these at the bridge and then proceeded to modify them to look more like lasers. It was actually quite simple to add them, really. First, I drew two lines using the line tool at about 5px wide on lime green. Then I added a noisy glow in a similar green and turned down the opacity. That was it. Next, I figured it was only logical if the green lasers were doing damage, otherwise Mikhail would never have dreamed of wasting such precious energy on them. So, I downloaded some grinder spark brushes from DeviantArt. I added some nice sparks coming from the bridge and overlaid an orange and red gradient over them. Next, I added some speckling to them to create more tiny sparks. This is where that “Fire” comes from on the bridge. I realized that with fire, there is smoke. So I created a new layer and brushed some white over the layer at 10 percent on a hard edged brush. I made billowing smoke, but then applied a rather harsh gaussian blur to tone them down. Then I turned the opacity down quite a bit to make it clear. Next, I repeated the same thing, but with black smoke for right next to the sparks.

Finally, I realized that where there is destruction in water, there is a splash. So I used the same brush set, but put it in the water and overlaid the water pattern (from the water in the image) over the splash. I applied some speckle to it, gaussian blurred the texture and was done.

At 25 layers, 4 separate images, and many hours of work, I was finally done with the project. I estimate that I spent nearly 16 hours on this project. Although these are just estimates, they are very close to what I spend on the project. I am disappointed that it really didn’t turn out as good as I hoped, but I am still happy with it. In fact, just writing this entry alone, at nearly 1200 words, it is a full-blown essay. From the exporting, color correction, resizing, and writing, I have worked on this for about 4 hours overall.

• Research: 30 min
• Bridge Photography: 2 hrs.
• Editing bridge w/ background: 2 hrs.
• Photographing cat: 2 hrs.
• Photoshopping: 6 hrs.
• Blog entry, including creating web thumbs: 4 hrs.

Below are the contact sheets for the project. You may notice that there are some from the mountain, this is simply because I was originally going to have the cat attacking the lodge at Schweitzer Mountain, but it didn’t work out as planned.

*** No animals were harmed in the production of this image.

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