Night & Light

Here is one more addition for the night light section. I took a lot of light photography this semester, but I am only now (at the end of the semester) able to edit and get the right look for many of them. This particular image is a continuation of my "Braving the Storm" collection. (The original image is farther down the page.) I loved the original image but I wanted to give it a focal point, so I decided to blend the drivers face over the top of it.
To accomplish this I first adjusted the levels and saturation to both images individually in Camera RAW. I then overlaid them in Photoshop and blended them together. For a final touch, I took the edited version back into Camera Raw and made a few more adjustments.

Blind:2/19/11 9:45pm; Idaho Falls; f 10 5.0 canon t1i

I call it blind because that's what you are when taking a picture with camera motion. You have no idea what the picture is going to look like. Like all my others, I took this inside a car. The white lights were from car headlights coming in from the back window, the red and blue were from the radio, and the orange was from the rpm dial. I upped the vibrance, saturation, and contrast in Photoshop.

Braving the Storm: 2/19/11 9:34pm; Idaho Falls; f 10.0 8.0 canon t1i

This was the first picture I took while getting onto the freeway. The snow was coming down really hard; that coupled with the camera shake and light gave this really cool effect. I did not make any edits to this photo.

MOVING LIGHT CAPTURE:

Devil's Pass: 2/19/11 9:42pm Idaho Falls, Freeway, f 10.0; 5.0; canon t1i; no tripod.

So on Saturday Tod and I got stuck in that really fun snowstorm. We crawled across the freeway as bigger and braver cars whizzed by. (The red squiggly lines are the passing cars.) While at times terrifying, the experience made for some fun pictures. I thought about using a tripod, but it wouldn't have made any difference with the shake and movement of the car over the unploughed road. In Photoshop I brought down the vibrance to -50 and brought the saturation up to 16.

LIGHT PAINTING

Original....almost. This is not quite what the original image looked like. somehow I lost it, and Raw wont even open up this image anymore to change it back, but this will hopefully give you a pretty good idea of what it looked like before.

Camera,Lights, Action:2/8/11 12:50am; Rexburg; f 7.1 10.0 canon t1i tripod

Edited

I did a lot of work on this photo for no reason, other than an idea turned into an addiction. I took this photo in my bathroom mirror using a blue book light. I then took it into RAW where I spent a lot of time using the adjustment brush. I made the background black by using the brush and changing the exposure and brightness. I also used it to bring out slight highlights of the camera and tripod. I then upped the saturation and adjusted the highlights for the graffiti light. I then took it into Photoshop and did a few more adjustments with the saturation.