File#: 1942121 * Nikon Z7, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 S, f/2.8, 30 sec, ISO 6400---I’ve written before how I think night photography is mostly “made up.” What I mean, with nature photography I normally try to recreate what I saw out in the field when I’m doing post-processing back at home. With night photography I can’t do that since what the camera sees is so much more than what we can see with our eye-balls. This is especially true with colors. You can’t see colors at night. All you can see are the tones. * I heard a great thing the other day on this subject. Color photography at night is like black and white photography in the day, you just pick whatever looks good. If you’ve ever struggled with adjusting the tones to get that super awesome B&W, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s all about making very small but critical choices to make the image truly stand out. * Unfortunately, the easy way to make your image stand out is simply increase the contrast and add a bunch of saturation. Both are very easy to do--i.e. easy to do too much of a good thing--in post processing. The art is doing just enough to make the image have punch without letting it get garish. What that is, is a matter of choice and taste. * This image was made up from 50 total image captures. There are three layers of pano’s made for the foreground, mid-ground, and sky. The fore & mid group were made with two focus points so everything is sharp from the closest rocks to the mountains in the background. The sky was shot at a completely independent set of parameters to actively pronounce the contrast of the galactic center. All three layers had at least three additional identical layers to be combined in post production for noise-reduction purposes. All together, this image includes 50 captures. As you can imagine, it was quite the challenge to put together in post production. * Cheers * Tom
