I'll post more photos later, but just spent a bit of time post-processing my favourite one, so just this one for now. I'll post more later when I get time to post-process.
San Francisco Ferry Building, from Treasure Island Canon Rebel T1i // ISO 100 // 250mm // f/20 // 15 sec. Postprocess in Lightroom 4. |
- You actually (surprisingly) don't want to use a low (wide) aperture for nighttime shots of scenery like this. I had brought my 50mm f/1.8 lens and figured that would be useful, but I didn't even take it out.
- Small aperture is your friend here, as those cool star patterns only show up past f/15 or so.
- Holy crap shooting in RAW is a good idea. I shot in RAW+Jpg, and realized only afterwards that my favourite shot (this one) was shot with White Balance of Daylight. This caused a very yellowish/orange glow of the lights which was... ok... but in comparison with the final image I am incredibly pleased I was able to change the colour temperature AFTER taking the photo. The comparison is shocking (see comparison image below)
- Hat, gloves and windbreaker are a good call for nighttime photography!
- Post-process is actually much more awesome than I thought. In my photo class we were taught to try to get everything right in-camera, even cropping if possible. So I try to do as much at shooting time as I can. But stuff like incorrect white balance or noise or wanting stronger shadows is too hard or impossible to get right at shooting time. I am VERY happy with the results you can get in Lightroom, and this post-process on the image above only took about 20 or 30 min. Not bad.
- Oh yeah, and Lightroom is awesome. It's slow on my Windows machine, not sure why. These RAW files are like 15 megs each, but still. I might try it on my Mac and see if it's faster there before I commit to buying it on one platform or the other.
Not a bad photo, in fact I still really like it. But man look at those oranges, the red/orange colour bleed on the buildings, not that great. |
Really happy with the more natural lighting look in the post-processed image, and the sharpness brought on by the improved contrast.
Those streaky lines by the way were caused by a tourist cruise boat driving by while I was taking the photo. The framing of the cruise boat lights on the San Francisco sign is a complete accident, and I love how that kind of accident works out sometimes :)
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