Day for Night

photo by K.C. Alfred from Gizmodo's “Photos of Day Taken at Night”

 

As some of you no doubt know (but which I just discovered today), Gizmodo regularly has a set of shooting challenges. The most recently posted results concern shooting a night, but an exposure long enough that the result is bright enough to be mistaken at first glance as daylight. The result tends toward pastel colors and dreamy motion blur of objects like the sea and clouds. I've been having a lot of fun taking advantage of the Camera Raw dialog to tease more out of photos shot with my 5D (which seems to have a couple of stops of latitude – a lovely sensor resides inside that body), but this opens a whole new area to explore.

Although they're hardly day-for-night, this is as good an excuse as any to share a few photos I took at night of a very bright moon behind broken clouds. The moon heavily illuminating their “silver lining,” with a touch of the watermelon sunset colors this part of the country is known for.

These were all shot hand-held (image stabilized lens) with my 5D mkII shortly after I got it, ISO 3200, f/4.0, with exposures ranging from 1/13 to 1/2 of a second – much shorter than the 6-30 seconds typical in the Gizmodo challenge winners. After seeing the above Gizmodo piece, I went back into the Camera Raw dialog and played with higher amounts of Fill Light and Highlight Recovery on some of them to see what I could get.

Like I said – this points to an area that seems well worth exploring. Enjoy.

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