50.0

Here's a shot I never got around to posting earlier this spring, before I get to other new stuff. I had to reprocess this for a client today and had some new ideas with it. I'm curious about your thoughts. It's the middle of the night at Mono under both faint light painting and distant artifical light sources so it's very surreal, but that is absolutely the goal here. Mono is a very surreal place and it evokes my artistic experimentation.

The waves were churning up this foam a few different times after storms and I managed to get many good shots of it moving around through the Tufa as a foreground. The north end of the Milky Way took a TON of well constructed contrast work to get to appear this bright and still retain good details, and is best to photograph in the early morning at this time of year.

One problem with these types of shots is that camera technology isn't quite there yet for optimal detail and it's definitely only going to print so big before suffering from grain and whatnot, as my exposures were all at 3200 ISO and higher and not as bright as I would have liked to be able to get them. It will be very interesting to take the D800 out in such conditions soon, as what I've seen so far looks a lot better in all regards at those settings. This was with the 5D II.

Another problem with these shots is what to do for a light source and how to process when there is no natural light source! It's photography, so obviously you have to make the most of the light but to do that in a night shot with no moon takes some sort of imagination, I guess. It's always an adventure......

2 exposures of ISO 5000 and 1 minute for the landscape and water and ISO 5000 and one exposure of 30 seconds for the sky, all at f/2.8. The landscape ones were DOF blended a little. The sky was looking due north so I could get away with 30 seconds and extremely little motion, if any.