This month I managed to get some sweet night shots. This was my first time trying long exposures, and i’m pretty happy with the results. This was of course before the winter weather set in, so it wasn’t quite so cold.

Sky Tower

This shot was taken without a tripod, but luckily the Sky Tower is lit up bright enough that using a steady brace with my elbows was enough to prevent motion blur. This shot taught me the basics of using noise reduction in lightroom, as the raw shot had quite a bit of noise, being at ISO 3200. Not the most interesting of compositions, but I’m happy with how the colour and structure of the tower itself came out, as well as the noise reduction.

Cranes

This shot was taken with a tripod. It took a couple of tries to get the timing right without boats moving in front of the cranes. I like how this one turned out. Theres something interesting about the cranes looming over the little light on the end of the dock. This was my very first long exposure, so it took a bit of tweaking to get the settings right where the lights from the cranes were not too overpowering, but the background lights still came though. I had to use manual mode to get it right.

Skyline

These next two were shot on the same night as the previous one of the cranes. It was super fun tring to make a pano of the skyline using multiple long exposures. I had to set all the settings once, then sweep the camera across the view to get the full width of the city. The first image was taken a few hundred meters to the left of the second one, as you can see from the shifted perspective. I think the first one works better, as its a little more focused and balanced, as the full width of the city doesn’t really improve the composition.

Tilt-shift

These ones are using a technique called ‘tilt-shifting’. Tilt shift lens are used for architecture photography to reduce distortion and allow more control of the focal plane. I am not rich enough to buy a special lens for a one off photo, so I used blurring filters in lightroom to get the same effect.

These were taken from the top of Mt Eden, of Eden Park and the Southern Motorway. The blurred linear filters to produce the tilt shift effect make these look like models of the city, which I think is pretty cool.

Tree

I took this one while playing around with the different apertures and HDR. This was taken by stitching 3 photos together, at different exposures to get the light more even, as exposing for the tree blew out the city, while exposing for the city made the tree too dark. I think it turned out pretty well overall, although there are some ghosting artifacts from the merge (check the sky tower).

If I was to take this again, I would try to correct the light levels without using HDR, as it wasn’t really needed in this instance.

Train tracks

Yep, you’ve seen this before. The classic train tracks disappearing into the forest photo. I thought I should probably have one too :D

Final thoughts

This month I learned about using noise reduction and colours, and long exposure. I still need to practice composition more, as I feel that this is something that I still very lacking in.