I’m not satisfied with this. In fact I’m not satisfied with anything I did since the concert, but I can’t help it, this image is everything even remotely usable I have from yesterday. It will have to suffice.
Yesterday morning was foggy, as almost all mornings these days, and when in the afternoon the light got real good, I had business in Klagenfurt. After having returned, after having had dinner, after … well, there was moonlight after all. I packed my tripod, mounted the Sigma 10-20, attached the cable release to the camera and the headlamp to my forehead, put on gloves and a warm jacket, and off I went.
This is the view from 100m southeast of our house to the west. The tree to the right is in our garden. I made some test shots at ISO 6400 (it’s impossible to compose at that level of light), settled at this composition and an exposure of 8 seconds, set ISO back to 200, activated high-ISO noise reduction and finally exposed for 256 seconds at f11.
The sky still came out too noisy for my taste. Noise ninja did no good job here and a gaussian blur caused banding. For some time I was tempted to drop in a replacement sky, but after some experimenting I have decided against it. I finally did a strong motion blur on the sky that also got rid of the star trails, and added a bit of noise to cancel out the remaining banding. Voilà. The other problem were the street lights. They had a strong greenish tinge that I have replaced by a more pleasant reddish one.
The Song of the Day is Bob Dylan’s wonderful love song “Moonlight” from the 2001 release “Love and Theft”.