Night Into Day

Having only yesterday repaired a poor, broken camera I found lonely and forgotten... Okay, so I might have bought it with a broken charging circuit because I'm a complete cheapskate. Either way (for literary purposes, we're going with the first story), I was eager to see just what my new camera could do- so, naturally, a near-midnight jaunt to the nearest park was the only logical option.

Given my interest in low-light photography, I decided to see just how detailed a photo I could get- a venture which left me pleasantly surprised, if not slightly terrified by just how much detail there was, waiting to be unearthed by the light-hungry (again, for a cheapskate) f1.8 58mm lens.

F1.8, ISO 400, Exposure 1/8

I would tend to consider this my "best" raw photo from the shoot, since it captured not only the most interesting detail in the scene (the reflection of the moon against neighboring clouds- yes, that's the moon, not the sun, promise!), but did so in a single, relatively short exposure, giving a crisp photo devoid of the blurring/aliasing issues I ran into during multiple-exposure composition. Furthermore, the comparatively bright focal target afforded a far lower ISO, removing the need for post-processing and noise removal.

Triple-Exposure, F1.8, ISO 400, Exposure 1.6 1.2 4/5, Composition via brightness preference

Having been enlightened as to the evils of high ISO values, my next photograph was meant to capture the previously-neglected foreground without introducing the much-dreaded noise- a step essential for my later wide dynamic range shoot. Although I was pleased with the lighting such a series of exposures afforded me, the wind foiled my plans of a crisp photo rivaling a single exposure, even with contrast-selective composition (I consider those artifacts a motion blur, since each exposure contains blur proportional to its exposure time).

Using the techniques I'd learned from the previous photosets, I set out to make a full-range composite photograph. When considering the shoot, I noticed an interesting detail in my earlier photos- a hint of color within the cloud's reflection, almost resembling that of a sunrise. Setting this in my sights, I gave in to the temptation of a higher ISO, trying to capture every bit of color that I could whilst retaining the smoother aspects via longer exposures, planning to blend these by saturation as below. My unfamiliarity with these techniques yielded a number of flaws in the resulting photograph, but I achieved what I consider incredible vividity of color from a scene which appeared only grey to the human eye.

8-Exposure, F1.8, ISO 400 800 1600, Exposure 1/32 1/16 1/8 1/4 1/2 1 1.25 1.5 2

This final composition was the culmination of the techniques I experimented with above, comprising of two triple-exposures (intended to capture the foreground trees and the moonlit sky, respectively) and a double exposure with lower ISO values and slightly out of focus to the other layers. The foreground shoot resembled the photograph above, giving a nicely detailed high-light picture, which I all but tuned out in the result due to tone-mapping issues (an area of future focus, perhaps). The far shoot, on the other hand, capture the exact color I had sought in the sky (as well as rays through the tree), but suffered aliasing with the unfocused foreground. The intermediate double-exposure I spoke of partially addressed this problem, contributing the area between edges of the tree and sky- although creating a "ghosting" effect due to the wind and spaced-apart shots. Ideally, I'll develop a means of avoiding this ghosting, as well as designed my own tonemapping algorithm so as to avoid the artificiality oft seen in the combination of scenes with drastically different lighting.