Long exposure of the setting moon
This was taken the same night this shot was, about an hour earlier. These shots were my first real experience doing long exposure night shots, and the first time I made a real effort to capture the stars.
unranged
by Kevin MacLeod
Looking down on a forested hillside enveloped by fog
This was taken on the road up Mt. Tamalpais. The entire mountain was engulfed in fog all around, and once I finally managed to burst through the clouds, it made for a great opportunity to take a shot. I will probably post some shots from the summit over the next few days.
I also want to start getting in to black and white photography. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything in this field - partly because they seem to be less popular than my colorful landscape stuff - but I don’t want the work I create to be dependant on meaningless viewer metrics. I’ve always felt its important to create the art you want to create, and I’m going to keep doing that.
I’ve probably spent too much time talking about lens sharpness lately. Although I do enjoy digging into the nitty gritty technical details of these lenses on a pixel-per-pixel level - and I’ll continue to do so - I have to admit that it just isn’t particularly important. The fact is, pretty much any lens is going to be pretty sharp on a modern camera. Case in point, this shot, taken with the Nikkor 28mm-80mm 1:3.3-5.6G.
San Francisco cityscape from afar.
This is the second one in a series of shots from this day. The clouds and lighting here were just stunning, and I spent the whole afternoon just driving around the Marin Headlands taking pictures.
I wanted to get an ultrawide coast scene in there, and this spot made for a perfect vantage point over the city and bridge. The light rays coming from behind the bridge were unexpected, but a very welcome surprise!
Sunrise though the San Francisco fog
I shot this shot a few minutes later.
This one was assembled as a 3 part RAW panorama, with some manual HDR expansion from alternate exposure. This cheap 50mm lens really is stellar for landscape shooting. Basically zero distortion at infinity, extremely sharp, weighs nothing. For probably about three quarters of my shooting, I could make do with this as my only lens.
Twin Peaks, San Francisco.
I’ve been here before and taken a couple of photos I happen to really like, but this time I came with a different idea in mind.
My dad and I have been growing our arsenal of lenses recently, and Twin Peaks at night is a perfect place to test how these lenses perform in regards to landscapes. An extremely contrasty scene with copious amounts of bright lights, mixed with incredibly sharp architectural elements at every distance, makes for the perfect equipment test field. The lenses I used for this particular shoot were the Nikon 50mm 1.8 AF-D (seen here), the Sigma 35mm 1.4 Art lens, and Samyang 14mm 2.8 ultra wide.
My goal wasn’t to create and a perfect shot-for-shot comparison between these lenses - those are boring, and readily available elsewhere for those who care - rather, my goal was to create some interesting pieces of artwork with each of them, with the commonality being the scene and conditions. I plan on uploading an example of a piece of art made using each of the lenses, then a second picture detailing some more technical details and pixel-level analysis. That keeps nicely with my belief that the art you create with a piece of technology is more important than the technology itself, but also feeds my (and potentially your) interest in discussing the nitty-gritty pixel-level detail.
I’ll keep a series of posts coming over the next few days, then write an article in summery of my findings that will be available on my site afterwards.
Anyways, on to this picture:
This particular photograph is a two part multi-exposure panorama, taken with the Nikon 50mm 1.8 AF-D lens, and processed in Photoshop.
I’ve always liked these long-exposure city shots, but I’ve just never been able to do them particularly well until recently. But hey, if the view from Twin Peaks can’t inspire you to take a good shot, you’re not trying hard enough! It really is a breathtaking sight, and the way I processed this one, I was simply trying to do the scene justice.
San Francisco moonrise.
I’ve been working on the ideas that would eventually lead to this shot for some time. I knew I wanted to do a long-exposure shot of the water rushing over the rocks, I knew I wanted to do a wide angle shot incorporating the water and the cityscape, and I knew I wanted to get something with the full moon in it. I wasn’t necessarily planning to combine all of them into one shot, but when I got here, everything just sort of seemed perfect. And even then, I almost missed the shot - I just barely managed to get the moon before it creeped away behind the clouds!
With that said, this shot did take a fair amount of work to get right, both at the time of the shooting and in post work. The ISO was higher than it should of been because the depth of field was so high, and I was using a weaker lens than I should have been. Ultimately though, it’s worth any amount of work to get a photo you’re happy with.
This was a multi-exposure shot, taken with the Nikon D800E, and processed in Photoshop.
I’ve been meaning to get into more long exposure night photography - I’m hoping this is the first of many more. For a first experiment with this type of thing, I am very satisfied with the results I’m getting so far, and I’m excited to get out and shoot more!
This one was taken with the Samyang 14mm f2.8 ultrawide on a Nikon D800E.
This one is a wide angle long exposure, taken with the D800E using the 16-35 VR.
Ultra wide shots are still something I don’t have a huge amount of experience with, but they are a lot of fun, and I’m learning my way around composing them.
This was a single long exposure, processed minimally in Photoshop.
