46.2

I didn’t get to the racetrack until just before midnight. I had to help a man and his wife fix their 3rd flat tire of the day on the gnarly dirt road out there around 10:30, and it took a while. We ended up having to ratchet in a bolt wrapped in Teflon tape through the hole in the tire, which was already quite large.
So I finally got to the race track, which is a few hour drive at 5mph (so you don’t get three flat tires!) and I was excited to shoot.
My options were to head right to bed and get up early for a sunrise shot, … or… Just grab my gear and head out onto the playa at midnight. I chose this option. :o)
I wandered and shot as the full moon rose for a couple hours. Right around 2am I finally got this shot, and was happy enough with what I could envision would be the result, that I made the long walk back to the truck to hit the sack.
For this shot I wanted to keep the image sharp, and keep the noise as low as possible. It was a chilly night, so that helped. I ended up shooting the FG at ISO 200 (to increase image quality) which ended up being around a 5 minute shot. That gave me a good solid FG to work with, but it also lead to star and moon trails, which is not what I wanted. So, from the tripod, without moving my camera, I adjusted the ISO to 1000 to shorten the shot to 20 sec (you begin to see star blur at around 30 seconds).
I blended the two shots and worked on noise control to finalize this image for print. I do like the result. Hope you do too. Cheers and have a great week.

–jared r.

Two Shots:
Foreground:
Canon 5DMKII
Canon 16mm-35mm @ 16mm
Iso 200
f/9.5
309 sec

Sky:
Canon 5DMKII
Canon 16mm-35mm @ 16mm
Iso 1000
f/8.0
20 sec

Raw file handled in Lightroom
Final adjustments (luminosity/dust) in Photoshop CS5

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