Anza Borrego

yo13dawg · Apr 3, 2014

Font's Point

One more astro with light painting

dxqcanada · Apr 3, 2014

Crap, that is some rugged terrain.

bc_steve · Apr 3, 2014

That first one is pretty neat. I drove through last winter but couldn't stop since I was traveling with my dog. Looks like I missed out!

Rick50 · Apr 4, 2014

#3 is intriguing. Nice composition. I want to go out and try this. Not sure what you did for light painting
but it seems it could use more light.

yo13dawg · Apr 4, 2014

Rick50 said:
#3 is intriguing. Nice composition. I want to go out and try this. Not sure what you did for light painting
but it seems it could use more light.

Used my headlamp on the low setting. Didn't want too much light that it looked too bright against the dark sky but I rarely light paint so its a bit of hit or miss. Only took a few exposures too.

jsecordphoto · Apr 4, 2014

that place looks amazing. Nice light painting too. I've been trying more light painting stuff, with mixed results. Are you stopping down and merging different exposures or just using a single frame? I've done both, and find when I do a sky exposure at like iso3200,f2.8, 25 seconds, and then switch to iso1600 f8 25 seconds theres more flexibility with the light painting. Sometimes it's really hard to not blow out the highlights on what I'm light painting when I try to get everything with one frame.

yo13dawg · Apr 4, 2014

jsecordphoto said:
that place looks amazing. Nice light painting too. I've been trying more light painting stuff, with mixed results. Are you stopping down and merging different exposures or just using a single frame? I've done both, and find when I do a sky exposure at like iso3200,f2.8, 25 seconds, and then switch to iso1600 f8 25 seconds theres more flexibility with the light painting. Sometimes it's really hard to not blow out the highlights on what I'm light painting when I try to get everything with one frame.

Interesting, never thought to try light painting at a lower ISO and blend. This is a single frame of 25 sec, and yea I tend to blow them out as well. All this took was a few swipes back and forth after I blew out a few previous tries.

yo13dawg · Apr 4, 2014

Here's the first one I tried light painting on. Came out a bit uneven haha

jsecordphoto · Apr 4, 2014

Sometimes it's really hard to blend photos, that's what keeps me from stopping down to do a lightpainting frame. I have had good results using layer masks and using grey to brush in the light painted foreground, that way it kind of evens out the scene. Have you seen any of Rick Parchen's night stuff? He does some really nice, natural looking light painting

yo13dawg · Apr 4, 2014

Took a look at his site. Some of the night stuff looks lit pretty good. Maybe some kind of dispersed light that's not too concentrated would help. But I'm sure its mostly just technique and practicing more.

WesternGuy · Apr 5, 2014

I like the first image - that is some gnarly looking terrain. Reminds me a bit of the South Dakota Badlands. I will put this one on my bucket list of places for landscape photography.

WesternGuy