Tag Archives: Night

London Shots

Posted by Steve on July 17, 2012 No comments

As promised, here are a few of the good shots as I go through and process them.

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This panorama was shot from up on Parliament Hill in Hampstead Heath. We stopped off at the Southampton Arms pub and had a few GREAT pints of cider. Somehow we thought it would be a good idea to stagger through the park and hike all the way up to the top of the hill. I am really glad we did since I was able to take this shot. I used Photoshop CS5 to stitch the panorama together.

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Here is your standard picture of the Clock Tower. Apparently, Big Ben is the name of the bell inside the tower. We stopped along the bridge and I snapped this one pretty quick. I was happy with how it came out.

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On the Thursday we were there, the building known as The Shard was having its opening ceremonies. Part of that was shooting off lasers across the city! I didn’t have much time to get to a closer location and thought that, through the London Eye would be a good shot. I set up for about an hour and got both of these shots. One is the lasers going off and the other is a Long Exposure of the Eye as it spun. The laser show started at 10:15pm and the Eye stops moving at 10:00pm

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Lastly (for now) is the London Underground. On the last day I realized I didn’t have any good shots of the Tube. I loved the blur on the train for this one, but had to do some cleaning up of some other parts of the shot. Lets just say someone gave a crack at photobombing.

I will try and have some more shots up soon.

TARDIS Long Exposure pictures

Posted by Steve on January 28, 2012 No comments

Using the same technique I was talking about in my last post, I decided to take a good subject out to a good location and try again. This time I went to one of the local Battlefield areas and found a great hill that provided an amazing view. L st night the weather was nice and clear so there were some good stars out as well.

I opted for two styles of picture, the straight long exposure that I turned in a good B/W shot, and a colorful light painting shot. For the subject, I used my ½ scale TARDIS that my son and I built. The light painting was actually done with Sonic Screwdrivers as my son and his friend ran wildly around the TARDIS.

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Overall I am happy with the results. They aren’t HDR, this is just a single shot taken between 2-3 min long. I fired the strobe once or twice on the outside of the TARDIS to give detail and then twice inside to give the light. (Click for Flickr Link)

Long Exposure lessons from the fail book.

Posted by Steve on January 26, 2012 1 comment

Last night I decided to try out a neat technique using long exposure and strobe highlights. in a good environment, this can be used to highlight areas and paint light into dark spots. Unfortunately, if you don’t have the right subject, it just doesn’t come out right.

The plan was to set up the camera on a tripod, up on the deck of my back yard, overlooking the trees in the yard. I set up a shot for F-16, ISO200, and decided on around 2-3min exposure. Then I took my SB-600 out into the yard and flashed various parts of the yard and the trees to highlight them.

(Important side note, wear shoes you don’t care about if you own a dog that typically uses the back yard as his restroom)

The end result was not what I was expecting at all, and not in a good way. The final picture looked like a picture of my back yard with spotlights on the trees:

The sky was very overcast, the angle was wrong, the subject of the trees just wasn’t that interesting. The only thing this shot had going for it was the concept. I understand the concept better now, it’s just a matter of finding the right subject. I’ll certainly revisit this idea again in the future after a scouting trip to find a good shot.

Interestingly enough, one of the shots you can just make out a ghostly figure of myself in the distance.