Last week I was driving my car when I suddenly saw this beautiful view. Luckily I was close to home, where I picked up my camera and tripod. I had to walk on the beach to get the moon above the cranes. The ground was frozen, making it easy to find a nice location to position my tripod and to shoot.
TECH-INFO: 9 JPGs with a stop difference. Combined them into a HDR file in Photomatrix Pro. The dynamic range was extremely high. The moon and lights were very bright and the little hill in the foreground is still dark. I had problems tone mapping because I wanted to preserve the details of the moon and to make the cranes pretty bright. So I made two tone mapped versions, one for the moon and another one for the cranes. In Photoshop I put the two versions on top of each other and blended them together using a mask. In simple terms: I cut out the moon and sticked it on the crane version. Afterwards I used the curves to enhance the contrast. The color balance and selective color tool were needed to enhance the background and cranes a bit. Finally I removed some resting noise with noise ninja, despites I darkened to sky already quiet a bit.
Mostly I use wide angle lenses, which I prefer, but for this one I had to use a telephoto. They are so sensitive to little vibrations evening when using a good tripod and a cable shutter release. Also because of the distance between the camera and the subject there is lots of air which may be polluted or foggy, hence making the image softer or even more dirty.
I did some trials using ISO400 to save time. This turned out to be a bad idea: way too noisy. My camera produces very little noise on the ISO for normal day time shots using fast shutter speeds, but for long exposures I have to be happy with ISO100, which is OK for me.
Cranes and Moon
Last week I was driving my car when I suddenly saw this beautiful view. Luckily I was close to home, where I picked up my camera and tripod. I had to walk on the beach to get the moon above the cranes. The ground was frozen, making it easy to find a nice location to position my tripod and to shoot.
TECH-INFO: 9 JPGs with a stop difference. Combined them into a HDR file in Photomatrix Pro. The dynamic range was extremely high. The moon and lights were very bright and the little hill in the foreground is still dark. I had problems tone mapping because I wanted to preserve the details of the moon and to make the cranes pretty bright. So I made two tone mapped versions, one for the moon and another one for the cranes. In Photoshop I put the two versions on top of each other and blended them together using a mask. In simple terms: I cut out the moon and sticked it on the crane version. Afterwards I used the curves to enhance the contrast. The color balance and selective color tool were needed to enhance the background and cranes a bit. Finally I removed some resting noise with noise ninja, despites I darkened to sky already quiet a bit.
Mostly I use wide angle lenses, which I prefer, but for this one I had to use a telephoto. They are so sensitive to little vibrations evening when using a good tripod and a cable shutter release. Also because of the distance between the camera and the subject there is lots of air which may be polluted or foggy, hence making the image softer or even more dirty.
I did some trials using ISO400 to save time. This turned out to be a bad idea: way too noisy. My camera produces very little noise on the ISO for normal day time shots using fast shutter speeds, but for long exposures I have to be happy with ISO100, which is OK for me.
Quite like the result of your efforts, I am also unhappy with the D200's noise, so hopefully will be upgrading to a D700 later this year.
LightningPaul: Many thanks. If they would make a new 10 Mpix (or even less) camera with the current technology then I would be extremely happy. The D700 is IMO fantastic but all my favorite lenses are DX and there are no alternative for them.
Truly an amazing night image. Exceptional processing, love those cranes, they appear so scifi like. Great exposure on the moon. Overall an outstanding composition.
LightningPaul: These cranes look indeed scifi. Those ones are now in rest position. When they are unloading a ship, they have another shape which makes more sense.
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