2 night views of an Adirondack Lake

[DanK]

After a great 1-day work shop with Mark Bowie (www.markbowie.com) on night photography, I started to experiment. The two below were taken from the same location on different nights, one cloudy and one clear. The first was taken around 9:30 PM with a 2-minute exposure @ f/4.5. The second was taken an hour later with a 10-minute exposure @ f/3.5, but it should have been 20 minutes. (The image was somewhat underexposed and therefore noisy). The colors are quite close to the raw image with the Adobe Standard rendering. PP was modest. You tend to get these very intense colors with night-time long exposures. The streaks are of course star trails.

I am new to this type of photography, so C&C are particularly welcome.

[Sunray]

The mood of the second one is much more intense I think. Therefor I like it more. It is a pitty that the picture has so much visible noise even at this scale. Nevertheless I like it. Maybe increase noise reduction a little bit. I think you won't loose too much details on the image. Personally I would clone of the star trails but that's only my taste.

bye
Robert

[DanK]

Hi Robert,

thanks for the comments. I agree about the noise. I am going to work on it a bit more. The big problem is that I mis-estimated the exposure and underexposed the second image. The best option under those circumstances is to take test shots at a very high ISO and long-exposure turned off so that you can zero in on the right exposure fairly quickly, then reshoot at a low ISO and with long-exposure noise reduction on. I didn't do that, so I saw the histogram only 20 minutes after setting up the shot (10 minutes for the exposure and 10 for the noise reduction) and did not have time for another try. Next time.

Dan

[Donald]

You've clearly identified the issue yourself, Dan, in terms of the exposure length. But, as Robert says, it has all the makings of a very strong image. I've just started seeing what I can do with long exposures and am getting many of them spectacularly wrong (need to go back and look at some of Colin Southern's work to try and learn the lessons again).