Milk Trails Over The Moulton Barn

Title

Milk Trails Over The Moulton Barn

Artist

Mike Berenson

Medium

Photograph

Description

When I have a night photography workshop in progress, I tend to like to shoot long-exposure photographs. It's a chance to see the beauty of the night sky and the colors that appear when you go beyond the shorter exposure times needed to capture the stars as points of light. It's also a good chance for me to spend time with students while capturing a cool image at the same time.This single exposure photograph was captured at the John Moulton Barn in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

How I Got The Shot
With the lean of the Milky Way stars lining up with the roof of the barn, the composition for this image seemed to come quickly. I could have used my Super Long-Exposure Cheat Sheet for the star trail settings but I just counted stops to figure out my settings on the first try.

For light painting, I used an LED light panel from F&V - which made it easy to balance my light painting against the night sky in my long-exposure. The light has a variable intensity setting so I could test it with a shorter exposure and then use that same intensity for the longer exposure.

In shooting the image, I Exposed To The Right by adding more light than what my artistic eye would prefer. I made sure to expose my image with enough light to get a good strong signal but not so bright where I would lose any of my highlight signal. Then in post-processing, I used a Photoshop curves adjustment (actually several of them) to bring back the brightness of the image - both globally and with targeted adjustments.

Using the curves adjustments on this image had a significant impact. In-fact, I decided to use this image in my post-processing training instead of a previous one I used to show. It seems to show a dramatic result (especially with the night sky) that becomes more evident once the curves adjustment layers are applied - making it a compelling example.

Photo Gear
• Camera Body - Nikon D800 Digital SLR Camera
• Camera Lens - Bower 35mm f/1.4 Lens for Nikon
• Tripod Head - Acratech GV2 Ball Head / Gimbal Head with Lever Clamp & Acratech Large Leveling Base
• Tripod Legs - FEISOL Elite CT-3472 Rapid Tripod Legs
• LED Light Panel - F&V Z96 UltraColor LED Video Light

Exposure Settings - Three Blended Exposures (with varied focus & light painting)
• ISO:400
• Aperture: f/2.8
• Shutter Speed: 1061 seconds

Uploaded

July 14th, 2015

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