But I felt this exposure gave me the best balance to blend everything together to create the final photograph that I was envisioning. I would need a lot of frames to create a lengthy trail. It definitely felt weird to think of star-stacking a series of 3-second exposures. Instead I chose an aperture of f/8 to control the direct light from the lamps and an ISO of 800 so the stars would retain some of their color and not blow out (Figure 4). I could have opened my aperture to f/2.8 or gone to a high ISO to help my camera record more of the fainter stars, but that would have resulted in more of the streetlight spilling into the sky. I chose a tighter 40mm focal length to get the viewer into the landscape, and I left one-fifth of the composition for the sky. I could have shot wider to include a bigger part of the sky that was unaffected by light pollution, but then the waterfall would have been too small and lost in the image. With my naked eye I could see one star in my composition. Yet another challenge was the lack of stars in the frame. Having even a little moonlight would have helped the visual transition from a bright bridge to a more illuminated sky. I shot a few more frames and chatted with rock climbers and other folks coming down the path as I waited more than an hour for the stars to come out.Īn additional challenge was the inky black sky of the moonless night. This foreground shot perfectly balanced the bridge and its lights (which had just come on) with the rocks and waterfall that were lit by the ambient light of twilight. So I hiked down the gorge to a vantage point I liked and shot the bridge during twilight. This is a fairly common technique, but it would definitely prove to be difficult given the high contrast between the lit bridge and the surrounding darker rocks and sky. My strategy was this: Combine a twilight blend with a star stack.
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