night photography » One Fine Picture

Airport after Dark

night photography, photo talk No Responses »

May 142011

I love night photography and when my local photography group (CPS) arranged a field trip to Burke Lakefront Airport, I grabbed my gear and took off.

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This is Northeast Ohio’s primary general aviation airport, handling about a hundred thousand operations a year from its two runways. Burke also hosts the annual Labor Day weekend Cleveland National Air show.

After moving around to avoid a large metal trash bin facing dead center in the approaching sunset, I settled in a corner of the grass that overlooked this small craft.
I was pleased with the image until some friends asked me how I got those wild colors. This was one of the those rare images that I took from the camera and just added a little sharpening…no levels, curves, nothing. If I Photoshop an image, I really don’t want it to look that obvious, but how do you make a real image look ‘more real?’

Before and After

Looking at the sunset closer, I realized that the camera captured the colors wrong. Digital technology always tries to create the best possible midtones because usually that’s where the action is — especially with pictures of people. So, a scene with a bright sunset and a dark plane shadow overwhelms the camera’s tiny circuits as it tries to figure out what’s important in the image.

Selective Color

Here the red sky looks too purple rather than the golden brown hue that I remember. So, I used a feature present in Photoshop CS and up called selective color. This is used by professional printers to change just about any color in CMYK or RBG and neutrals – plus it has the benefit of being able to add pure black to an RBG image.

I choose the magenta control and decided to take some magenta away. Taking the magenta out of the magenta might not seem intuitive but it diminished that purple color throughout the image. I then added yellow and black and recreated the sunset that I remembered.

More to come…

Happy Holidays

camera settings, F-stops, my favorites, night photography No Responses »

Dec 212010

A little late but there’s still a few days left in the season to see the holiday lights. These gems were found at the Lake MetroParks FarmPark annual country lights festival.

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I always like night shots and even though there was quite a crowd, not too many people felt like standing in the middle of a snow bank to sample the freezing air.

Took a sturdy tripod, set my camera to mirror lock-up, and turned the image stabilization off, so that I would avoid any vibrations that could blur the shot. I used a high f-stop, around f18 or so, to get great sharpness and depth of field. Some of the images took 20 seconds or more to capture.