Hello everyone,

I am from Canada and new to the site so I thought I would start out by posting a recent image from my trip to the American southwest.

This image was sort of an experiment on a highly photographed location, I tried to get something different although I am sure this has been done many times before.

After sunset we waited for the stars to appear and began shooting, using various light sources to light up the arch, finally settling on a single flash burst to light the arch. We had tried lighting from different positions but running around at night in the dark near some drop offs did not seem to safe.

Shot with Nikon D300
ISO 1250 F4 @30 sec.

Welcome to the site. That's an interesting way to photograph the arch.

yea, interesting, I think if you were to use a gel filter you have have be able to get more accurate colors.

cool shot nonetheless. . .It looks scifi. . .

Welcome to NWP!

Jimmy,
I like the concept a lot. I'm not sure if painting it with light would give you more detail or whether you preferred the ghostly aspect of it as in your image. But very nice effort regardless.

In presenting the image, I'd suggest you put a dark border around it. The image on white just looks too under-exposed. A dark border would lighten up the arch and help show off the details.

Welcome to the forum.

Jim

Thanks for the replies.

The whole color issue is subjective, the color at night is cooler than day or sunset and to my eyes the image posted is closer to what I saw. I have warmed it up in and it does have more of a "realistic" look that we see in daylight hours. We did paint the arch with LED head lamps but the Arch is quit large and the area around it is uneven so scrambling around at night could be dangerous. I agree a black boarder would help it stand out.

I will continue to play with the image and see what I can tweak out of it. 2 weeks of shooting got me 3000 images to pick through from Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Sedona area, Grand Canyon, Arches NP, Bryce NP, Canyon Lands NP, Zion NP, Tuweep/Toroweep and many places in between.

Thank you

Hey Jim,

Thanks for sharing. Would you mind sharing the technique you used to paint the arches? You did a very even job of it. Given the high ISO, it looks surprisingly clean. Does it look that way on the full sized print?

James

James

We experimented first using a flash from multiple angles up to 4 different bursts, we found this tough given the size of the arch and need to run around an block the flash head from getting in the shot, we also found that is was overexposing too much even at lower flash settings. then we tried our head lamps but we found we did not have enough power to do the whole arch evenly. in the end we settle on one main flash burst straight on from farther away and a another from the left side.

I am not totally happy with what we got but it's was a good experiment. The top of the arch needs more exposure which I will tweak later and work on the colour balance, I have not printed it yet but at full resolution it looks much better. For 1250 ISO I am quit impressed over all. My friend was shooting with the Canon EOS 1DS Mark II at the same ISO and he was blown away with the the images from the D300.

Thank you