Thanks to everyone who commented on the original post of this scene last week. I took your advice about improvements, and I did some experimentation to find a solution to the problem that I asked about -- namely stars apparently growing as I shrunk the image for the Web. THE FIX? I believe I have a found a viable solution to that problem; To keep the stars from apparently growing as the image shrinks, I merely reduced contrast by bringing down the mid-level tones with a curves adjustment.
My first attempt was a global adjustment which reduced contrast overall, and I am OK with that for this image, but if you want to retain contrast in areas other than the stars, it's easy enough to apply the curves adjustment to only the sky.
Please compare this to
my first attempt, and tell me if you think this is an improvement.
As I learn more about night photography, I always appreciate any help. However, I still am trying to reproduce images of real night scenes, more than creating one of those beautiful and popular combinations of day and night images that don't occur at the same time in reality. (I like those, too, but that's not what I'm shooting for here. The light painting is a compromise for the sake of composition, trying to simulate how headlamp or campfire light might illuminate nearby objects.)
P.S. It helps to view these in a dark or very dim room. I guess my next job is to try to fix that problem!
Canon 5DII; 14mm.
30 sec. @ f/2.8; ISO 1600
Tripod in knee-deep water, "painting" light with an LED headlamp.
2 vertical frames stitched by hand in CS5
Comments
14 commentsJohn & Patty