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honez Registered: August 2008 Posts: 695	Trying something different the other night, I decided to get some long exposure shots of a local lake late at night, lit only by the light of the full moon. I was quite surprised how they turned out, almost as if it was during daytime. This is a three minute exposure, f/8 at ISO 400. Obviously the clouds moved quite a bit and you can see some small star trails. See it on Flickr here, Lake Samsonvale by Moonlight by _honez
	· Date: Tue October 11, 2011 · Views: 769 · Tags: 1 · Filesize: 144.5kb, 563.4kb · Dimensions: 1000 x 667 ·
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	Keywords: Moonlit Lake

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Clem

Registered: February 2011
Posts: 662

Tue October 11, 2011 9:42pm

Wow. Stunning. A 3-minute exposure? You must have steady hands. Wink

Seriously, did you need to do a lot of noise reduction or color balancing in post? I would think that any imperfections in the sensor would really become amplified with such a long exposure time. I definitely have to try this sometime. I guess I'll have to look into that remote shutter switch... I think my camera maxes out at 30 seconds if you don't have a "bulb" connected. Thanks for the inspiration!!

richingr

Registered: October 2010
Posts: 1,459

Tue October 11, 2011 9:49pm

Lovely

honez

Registered: August 2008
Posts: 695

Tue October 11, 2011 11:01pm

Hi Clem,
The noise wasn't too bad really. I was really surprised as how "daylight" it looked as I was expecting a lot more washed out image.
I do some sharpening and NR in Adobe Camera RAW as I start my workflow which gets rid of most, and I eyedrop the AWB to get any colour cast out at that stage. In post I did some curves, levels and additional NR where needed (again, not that much).
To get an idea of the required exposure I take a couple of experimental hand helds on AV setting, f/2.8 ISO 13600 to get a reading on the shutter speed. Those shots are really, really noisy. My iPhone light meter was pretty useless as there wasn't enough light to get an accurate reading. From there it's a couple of quick calculations to work out the correct exposure time after examining the histogram at whatever the aperture and ISO settings are that you want.
I figured for this f/8 would be a good compromise as I was pretty much focus-guessing, due to the poor light and looking at it on the back of the camera. There's no way my A/F would work in this situation, so I set it to infinity and f/8 would give me a better DoF if I was out slightly.
I could have cranked the ISO down to 50 but that would have been a 24 minute exposure. Closing the aperture would have doubled or even quadrupled the time, so I I ended up going for f/8 + 3 mins.
And yes, you do need a remote shutter release, Bulb setting and a fair amount of patience to be standing around in the dark.
(A herd of cows wandered over to where I was to see what I was up to, which kinda freaked me out at the time as I originally didn'tt know they were there and they were nothing more than shadows in the moonlight. It was almost midnight and this is right next to Samsonvale Cemetery, which I had to walk through to get to the location and back to my motorbike when I finished. LOL The things we do for the sake of a photo!)

Beth

Registered: May 2010
Posts: 1,534

Wed October 12, 2011 12:20am

And this one is great too! Wow, it's really inspiring!

Clem

Registered: February 2011
Posts: 662

Wed October 12, 2011 12:49pm

Thanks for all the details on the set up and post work. You probably saved me an hour of experimentation whenever I get to trying this (which I'm definitely going to have to do). LOL at the ghost-cows that stopped by for a visit!