By Jim Zuckerman
With very long exposures at night, you can create images that you never saw with your eyes but they are, nevertheless, intriguing and often beautiful. A case in point is this moonrise over the Atlantic taken from San Juan, Puerto Rico. The moon was full, and when a full moon is this high in the sky, there is no light except for the very bright lunar surface. The sky is black, the water is black, and only the moon and its reflection can be seen when looking out to sea.
With a long exposure – in this case six seconds – I was able to bring out the eerie colors in the water and the sky. I used 400 ISO in an attempt to limit the length of the exposure only because the wind was blowing quite hard and I was afraid of camera movement. I applied a downward pressure on the tripod-mounted camera in an attempt to prevent blur. I avoid going above 400 ISO whenever possible due to the increased digital noise.
The only adjustment I made in Bridge was to open up the shadows a little bit with the ‘fill light’ slider. This is a remarkable tool in CS3 that helps bring back detail in the shadows that appears to have been lost.
Comments