Experiment_626
Stealth Geek
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2008
- Messages
- 1,652
So, this is my latest shot ...
Blue Night on the Forbidden Mountain by Scott S. Baxter, on Flickr
Here's the story of how I got this, and how it wasn't as simple as I had expected ... this is the same text I posted on Flickr:
Ever since Disney's Animal Kingdom stopped hosting evening Extra Magic Hours, getting a photo such as this has been more difficult. Even at the best of times, opportunities to shoot at night in the park were more limited because it never stays open as late as the other parks in general.
On the first night of our most recent trip -- this would be February 25, 2012, to be exact -- I saw that Animal Kingdom would be open until 8 pm, and I knew this was one of the photos I wanted to get. Expedition Everest features what is, to my eyes, the most impressive rock work in Walt Disney World. If someone was knocked out and then allowed to awaken in the park in the shadow of EE, he might easily believe the mountain was real at first. The forced perspective here and the subtle detail is very effective. Of course, REAL mountains are generally not so blessed with dramatic lighting at night -- but they wish they were!
This was a trickier result to achieve than it might appear. I wanted to capture the detail in the mountain in this HDR. To that end, I shot my typical nine-exposure bracket, followed by another set with exposure compensation set at -4.0. Therefore, I had underexposures as low as eight stops under, where only some of the detail on the brighter parts of the mountain and the point light sources were visible at all. Processing every other exposure yielded the basis for what you see here. The only problem was that the mountain itself was a horrible, posterized-looking mess. I was annoyed because I considered the mountain a rather important part of the image, to put it mildly. In the end, I resorted to a tactic I've used a few times before. I went back to a copy of the original exposures and cropped them all identically very tight on the mountain. I then processed the cropped version separately through Photomatix Pro -- three different ways. I opened those three as layers in Photoshop and combined them in various percentages until I was happy with the result, then I brought that into the overall image and masked in the much better-looking mountain. 10,000 other little tweaks (give or take) ensued, and I present the result.
One other note: I considered myself fortunate the evening I shot this. It was about 10 minutes before park closing when I set up for this, and I was fortunate that the ride went down right at that time, with a visible train climbing the lift hill. I'm sure some of the guests who had to be evacuated off that rather precipitous-looking stretch of track probably weren't as happy, though!
SSB
Blue Night on the Forbidden Mountain by Scott S. Baxter, on Flickr
Here's the story of how I got this, and how it wasn't as simple as I had expected ... this is the same text I posted on Flickr:
Ever since Disney's Animal Kingdom stopped hosting evening Extra Magic Hours, getting a photo such as this has been more difficult. Even at the best of times, opportunities to shoot at night in the park were more limited because it never stays open as late as the other parks in general.
On the first night of our most recent trip -- this would be February 25, 2012, to be exact -- I saw that Animal Kingdom would be open until 8 pm, and I knew this was one of the photos I wanted to get. Expedition Everest features what is, to my eyes, the most impressive rock work in Walt Disney World. If someone was knocked out and then allowed to awaken in the park in the shadow of EE, he might easily believe the mountain was real at first. The forced perspective here and the subtle detail is very effective. Of course, REAL mountains are generally not so blessed with dramatic lighting at night -- but they wish they were!
This was a trickier result to achieve than it might appear. I wanted to capture the detail in the mountain in this HDR. To that end, I shot my typical nine-exposure bracket, followed by another set with exposure compensation set at -4.0. Therefore, I had underexposures as low as eight stops under, where only some of the detail on the brighter parts of the mountain and the point light sources were visible at all. Processing every other exposure yielded the basis for what you see here. The only problem was that the mountain itself was a horrible, posterized-looking mess. I was annoyed because I considered the mountain a rather important part of the image, to put it mildly. In the end, I resorted to a tactic I've used a few times before. I went back to a copy of the original exposures and cropped them all identically very tight on the mountain. I then processed the cropped version separately through Photomatix Pro -- three different ways. I opened those three as layers in Photoshop and combined them in various percentages until I was happy with the result, then I brought that into the overall image and masked in the much better-looking mountain. 10,000 other little tweaks (give or take) ensued, and I present the result.
One other note: I considered myself fortunate the evening I shot this. It was about 10 minutes before park closing when I set up for this, and I was fortunate that the ride went down right at that time, with a visible train climbing the lift hill. I'm sure some of the guests who had to be evacuated off that rather precipitous-looking stretch of track probably weren't as happy, though!
SSB
That's a piece of art.
it! good job!
