Shot in dead of night (naturally), ISO 1600, in light rain and wind. Foreground and boats painted with high-intensity penlight.
From RAW in ACR/CS3
Topaz DeNoise for noise reduction, Focus Magic to remove motion blur from stars, OnOne 2.5 for local area contrast adjustment, gradients top and bottom, Adamus sharpening.
Statistics
Place: 3 out of 43 Avg (all users): 7.0000 Avg (commenters): 8.4167 Avg (participants): 6.1053 Avg (non-participants): 7.0733 Views since voting: 5485 Views during voting: 581 Votes: 251 Comments: 61 Favorites: 8 (view)
hey robert .. a wonderful and uniquely bear_music image .. many congrats on your ribbon and another awesome addition to your collection of amazing photographs .. :)
congratulations, Robert! The first place could get away with a 4s exposure at 800ISO, and you needed 66s at 1600. Rural life is harder :).
I was about to comment on that, over there :-) Not only that, he was stopped down a stop and a half more. It really has me scratching my head, mainly over how he managed a blue sky... I mean, if the sky's lit by ambient reflected light, wouldn't be a much warmer color? CF my clouds... It's all a mystery to me :-)
Hi Robert (and LevT), excuse me for commenting about my entry, which is not as good as yours, but I thought it could be useful to clarify: As compared to mine, ambient light for your shot was close to zero. I think that is why my settings: faster shutter speed, smaller aperture and lower ISO, did the job for me but they would not work for you.
About exposure: You did not have thousands of light bulbs within the frame as I did, so I had not to overexpose highlights too much (in mid and background), leaving some room for balancing exposure during pp. The easiest way (only way in basic editing) was to underexpose on a single shot, and then rescue the shadows in pp. A better way would've been to make a multiple shot HDR, but I was not sure if it was advanced or basic editing, it was too cold for the pg to stay still, and my tripod and me were standing on a not so steady ground. Foreground ambient light was way less intense and firing the flash a few times was necessary to fill that area.
About color: Too many kinds of artificial light temp's within frame, from extremely warm to cold bulbs, and used automatic WB. Sky came out dark blue, even darker than yours.Then, in raw processing, I found that approx. 2500K WB provided a good color balance, which added a cooler blueish hue to sky. Rescuing exposure of shadows made the sky a bit lighter and the whole image looked more balanced. The rest was usual advanced editing ..... I hope now it is less of a mystery :-). If you have any more questions please feel free to ask.
A superb photo, and a very worthy ribbon winner. i notice the 66 second exposure - did you combine a shorter one to get the stars as points rather than trails?
congratulations, Robert! The first place could get away with a 4s exposure at 800ISO, and you needed 66s at 1600. Rural life is harder :).
I was about to comment on that, over there :-) Not only that, he was stopped down a stop and a half more. It really has me scratching my head, mainly over how he managed a blue sky... I mean, if the sky's lit by ambient reflected light, wouldn't be a much warmer color? CF my clouds... It's all a mystery to me :-)
Tremendous colors captured here, where it would seem impossible to get this much info at this time of night/morning. Obviously a long capture (due to the boat's movement) yet the grass has remained sharp and the stars are bright and sharp as well. The flow of the clouds and the grass seem to frame the trees and stars and the composition is just excellent. I'd love to steal a trick or two on how you got the stars to pop so sharply with such great color like that. Outstanding.
This is my favorite in the challenge. Love the starts, the colors, the movement of the clouds, the stillness, the tranquility. It's a stunner and I hope the hands down winner. Good luck!
Passing Squall, Herring River
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