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
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.
Taco Bell
For my final exam, I really wanted to give myself a challenge, so I chose to do surrealism for my final. Furthermore, after one of my latest projects, I really enjoyed doing the surreal images. So I decided to give it a go. Really, the focus of the project was to be “Bringing Color into the World.” For the photos, I had models painting “saturation” to the scene in various ways. I also decided to have fluids *magically* turning into color… or paint.
1: Arcata Beach, Arcata, CA
1. While in California, I had my original idea for this project. We were down at the beach while it was storming, and I got this sick picture of the beach. I had this idea to be painting saturation, or color to the image. So… I took this picture with the intent to later add to the image.
I found that it is actually very difficult to explain this project to people, so I just stopped bothering. You really have to see the images to understand.
Equation
2: Face Painting
2. While trying to consider other ideas for the project, I saw an image on DPChallenge that inspired me to paint someone’s face. I took a macro shot of my brother and then proceeded to add him into the picture so it looks like he was painting his face blue… like a Na’vi!!!!1!1!!!!!!!!11omgz!!!!avatar!!! Some of my inspiration for this image came from this image on DPChallenge.
Equation for image
3: Recursive Danelle
3. In the past, I have seen recursive images, where the models are holding photos of themselves holding photos of them selves, etc. I decided to take this one step further and have Danielle paint herself *magically* into the photo. It actually turned out pretty awesome.
4: Schweitzer Mountain, Sandpoint, ID
4. While at Schweitzer one day, I had this crazy idea to apply my project to the resort… so I did. I took this photo coming from ze terrain park…. and it turned out pretty awesome after I added Stephen pouring *magical* paint on it.
5: Taco Bell
5. For this photo, the cover photo, I decided to apply my series to Taco bell. Stephen is in front of the image, painting the building back to color.
6: Baja Blast
6. On this photo, I thought it would be cool to apply some Nacho to my series… and took a photo of Taco “Nacho” Bell. I had inspiration because of the rule that one is not allowed to add soda to their water cup. So I made it look like the water tap was filling the cup with Baja Blast.
7: Paint
7. One the thought of making water change into crazy substances, I decided to refill my *magical* paint bucket with water. But it turns magically into paint.
8: Lake Coeur d'Alene, CDA, ID
8. For my last photo, and for – quite possibly – one of the better ones in the series, I chose to use this photo. I was downtown with my brother, and decided to use this magical paint to bring the color back to the world… and in this case, the lake. Special Note: For the record, I did not pour paint into the lake. That would be bad for the environment, and illegal. This was purely the work of Photoshop; if you are not able to tell.
Final Word
When I chose this project, I really had no idea it would be as difficult as it was. I chose it as a challenge, and got exactly what I asked for. I feel that I have 5 fantastic ones, along with 3 good ones. I don’t, by any means, think they are bad, but I just feel that I did a better job on certain ones. My personal favorites include the Recursive Image, The Face Painting, Pouring the paint into the lake, and the one taken on the beach. I feel that these were by far the strongest ones in the project.
Below is the contact sheet with all of the images involved in the making of this project.
Finally, in the style of my past posts, I am going to include the same quote as before.
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
From a program that was shown to me by Mr. Twitchell, and developed byAnatoly Zenkov, I was able to track the motion of my cursor throughout the whole editing process. Below is the path overlaid a screenshot of my desktop.
Mouse-Path for duration of editing.
The past week, I worked on doing some fish tank shots. I tried some ink, coins, and other random things that looked like they would be cool to drop in there. I positioned the fish tank on my counter, and placed two strobes (1 behind, 1 to the side). I proceeded to take some sweet ink shots.
The real reason I did the ink shots, was simply because they look pretty awesome. I really don’t think they are my most amazing photographs, but they look pretty cool. My brother and I purchased the fish tank from some dude on Craigslist for $10. Pretty good deal for a 10 gallon glass tank.
After my brother did his shots, I figured I might as well do them also, so really the inspiration for this project is his post.
Ghoti is a constructed word used to illustrate irregularities in English spelling. It is a respelling of the word fish, and like fish is pronounced /ˈfɪʃ/. It has,
- gh, pronounced /f/ as in tough /tʌf/;
- o, pronounced /ɪ/ as in women /ˈwɪmɪn/; and
- ti, pronounced /ʃ/ as in nation /ˈneɪʃən/.
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