Help With A Shot Please

Peeb · Dec 11, 2016

Hope you get it the way you want eventually, but it looks pretty spectacular to me already.

adamhiram · Dec 11, 2016

I try to shoot holiday lights around dusk so that the house is still illuminated and the holiday lights aren't overpowering, although that won't capture the night sky. Perhaps try shooting the house and lights at dusk, then leave the tripod setup a while and come back and take the night time shots, exposed for the stars, and composite later?

smoke665 · Dec 11, 2016

snowbear said:
I like the second shot.

greybeard said:
Me too

Peeb said:
it looks pretty spectacular to me alread

Thanks all, with this final edit I think I'll back off of it for awhile, as it's becoming a little frustrating, reaching a point where more work equals less improvement. I'm still loosing the very center of the lights but everything I've tried so far hasn't worked any better. I was able to work on the existing sky and stars, to bring them out more, then added the North Star (sorry if it's cheesy call it aesthetic interpretation). May try it again when I get to the store and get a couple of dimmers.

Drive-By-Shooter · Dec 11, 2016

wow! very nice.

smoke665 · Dec 11, 2016

Drive-By-Shooter said:
wow! very nice.

Thank you

snowbear · Dec 11, 2016

At least, in the end, you had fun with it.

Drive-By-Shooter · Dec 11, 2016

student/teacher both learn. i learned why HDR in the camera has a big advantage due to the different sensitivity of the pixels.
great forum. i've seen lots of good advice in the short time i've visited.

photo1x1.com · Dec 16, 2016

Great image, I don´t like the artificial look of the sky though.
I once faced a similar problem. If this is your house (or you have a key for it

). You can do the same approach I did (especially if you have an assistant):
There might not even be a need for HDR, or even photoshop. Keep the exposure the same as you had, and then you go and turn off the lights after e.g. 15 seconds (or 20sec. or whatever you like best). If you have somebody to do that for you, you can use your phone to give instructions rather than shout out loud

or maybe you have an app you can use to remotely control your camera?. That way you can exactly adjust the brightness of the light to the stars in the back. If you want the foreground to be lit like in the final edit, you just take two exposures - one with brighter lights to light the foreground and then you mask the layers in photoshop with a very soft brush.
Did you use a flash? In the final edit it looks as if there is some light comming from the camera. To avoid that direct light look, you could set the flash to a lower power setting, walk around during the 30sec and fire the flash from various positions. And cover it with an orange filter (it looks slightly cooler) - or adjust it later in lightroom using local adjustments.
In regard to your 30sec limit mentioned above - consider using bulb and some kind of cable or wireless release to not touch the camera during the image is taken.
EDIT: bulb wouldn´t be that good of an idea because that would introduce star trails

smoke665 · Dec 17, 2016

@photo1x1.com The only thing I didn't try was dimming the lights or turning them off as you suggested. I suspect that would have helped, but I reached a point where I was ready to move on, maybe one day I'll try again. The final image was a 5 shot composite merged as an HDR in PS. The sky was not altered except to clone out the star trails. The stars were then sharpened and dotted with a white circular brush, and the North Star added. The fill light on the front and side of the house is from the moon which was behind/above me. The other thing I've been experimenting with is an HDR composed of Pixel Shift images, but I really need a faster processor and more ram for that.

Drive-By-Shooter said:
i learned why HDR in the camera has a big advantage due to the different sensitivity of the pixels.

Thank you for the comments. Again, I'm not sure if my earlier comments on "auto selection" of ISO on in camera HDR applies to other manufacturers. I'm also not sure that it's an advantage, if it increases the ISO to a point where noise becomes an issue. At least with my model, I've found that HDR composed post, were superior to those created in camera.