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10/10/2005 03:30:45 AM · #1 |
1st of all I want to thank everybody for voting and commenting so generously on my submission to Your corner of the world.
I have a little story to tell, together with some outtakes, original and other pics to show you what happened. If somebody learns anything from it I’ll be happy.
OK, my first idea was to re-shoot my Sunbreak of last year. That scored pretty well, and with the right weather, and a nice sunset I would have a great pic.
I arrived at Kinderdijk an hour before sunset, but all the windmills where facing away from me, and into the upcoming sunset. Not the view I wanted.
So I started shooting some pics, just to have something to submit.
After a while I met 2 photographers (Deryk Baumgartner and Serdar Ugurlu) with nice camera’s a 20D and a D70, so I just had to look at the equipment they had.
We started talking and they told me they would also do some night photography later.
I’ve been to Kinderdijk in the night, but it’s really really dark there, so I questioned their decision. After a nice McDonalds meal (you have to eat don’t you) we drove back to Kinderdijk and as I expected it was dark. We had to use a flashlight just to see where we were going.
Deryk (who is now also a member of our little community) took his 1st picture (4 minutes exposure) and I was like, Yeah right, this will turn out great NOT.
The moment the photo came up on his display I gasped, and didn’t know how fast I had to set my tripod up and attach the camera to it. That was such a cool pic.
Because I didn’t anticipate the night shots I didn’t bring my cable realease, so the best I could do was 30 Seconds. So I started calculating, 4 minutes on Iso 100 = 2 min’s iso 200 = 1 minute iso 300 = 30 sec Iso 800
So I had to do with Iso 800 to get the light he had, and it worked.
So we did some more and I really started to get a feeling for it.
OK On to the challenge entry, I had shot some other pics, but didn’t know what to submit. I asked all my family and friends to pick the best one, and this one came up the most.
The problem was the tilted horizon and the cut-off reflection. I knew that would cause problems. I choose to keep as much reflection as possible so I did not make the horizon straight.
Postprocessing:
I shot in RAW and what I did was open up the raw file in Rawshooter essentials.
I let rawshooter calculate whitebalance and I came up with this original shot.
So this is the unedited photo, only resized.
As you see it already looks like the submitted file, but a little to dark. So I dit some levels on it, cloned out some grass out of the reflection.
Then it looked almost like a daylight picture. The stars where clearly visible on the original 8Mp file, but resize and noise removal caused half of the stars to disappear. (I’ll post a 100% crop of the sky later today)
So I dodged the less bright stars to make them more visible. And after that I burned everything around the mill (on a separate layer) to make the surrounding a bit darker.
Outtakes and stuff
These are the other shot's I considdered for this challenge:
   
And one of Deryk’s photo’s of that night is found here
Message edited by author 2005-10-20 05:05:56. |
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10/10/2005 03:50:47 AM · #2 |
Congratulations on a job well done. I commented during the challenge how much I liked that shot....and your ribbon is well deserved.
Judi
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10/10/2005 05:28:05 AM · #3 |
Great shot -- definitely one to steal one's sight for a time.
But ... just out of curiousity, how do you compose a shot in total darkness?
David
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10/10/2005 06:05:20 AM · #4 |
Originally posted by Philos31:
1st of all I want to thank everybody ..... One of Deryk’s photo’s of that night is found here |
Congratulations Peter; it's a terrific shot & has inspired me to try something similar (alas no windmills here, but I'll find something!)
Thanks too for the link to Deryk's shot ... click that link, folks; it's an awesome photograph as well! |
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10/10/2005 08:54:00 AM · #5 |
Originally posted by Britannica:
Great shot -- definitely one to steal one's sight for a time.
But ... just out of curiousity, how do you compose a shot in total darkness?
David |
Well, composing in complete darness is tricky, hence the tilted horizon.
I just shot and looked at the display if everything was allright. We were there during the day to check out all the cool spots to shoot at.
On the little LCD the horizon looked fine ;)
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10/10/2005 10:18:26 AM · #6 |
i think all your outtakes are very nice and unique.
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10/10/2005 11:36:15 AM · #7 |
Beautiful shots, all of them! Thanks for sharing the story, original, and process. It's always interesting to see the originals to get an idea of the post steps that were used.
Congrats on the ribbon, too! |
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10/10/2005 11:46:08 AM · #8 |
| Yes...definitely thanks for posting all this information. That's what makes this site wonderful! All your photos are really nice, but I like the one with the walkway the best. (The pinker one.) |
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10/10/2005 12:26:14 PM · #9 |
Philos, here's your original with the horizon leveled using the Photoshop "skew" tool to move the upper left corner upwards. Doing it this way you lose nothing of the foreground reflections. Beautiful shot regardless!
:-)
Robt.
Message edited by author 2005-10-10 12:26:47.
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10/10/2005 01:31:04 PM · #10 |
Wow, they come out jut like that, no painting with flashlight and such? Amazing. In what phase was the moon, was there a moon (I cannot remember because I haven't been looking at the sky much)?
Great, great, great, gotta try that.
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10/10/2005 04:05:47 PM · #11 |
Thanks Robt!
Here is the 100% crop I promised:
So you can see the stars are realy there, and you can also see its iso 800 ;)
Edit:
If there are any questions, just ask them I will gladly answer them...
Message edited by author 2005-10-10 16:09:00.
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