I finally decided to get the courage up to post here. Figured I was in the small ponds and want to join the big fish. This is one of my first attempts at night time and B&W photography. Dry Falls NC taken a few weeks ago. Thoughts?
You sure picked a pretty creative shot to post first. Overall, these shots are pretty complicated, so nice work on this. When light painting a scene, that's where it really can be tricky. So I do like the overall look of the stars, the moon, the water. The only place this shot could use improvement would be to have had not quite so much light on the trees and leaves. Perhaps using a layermask to just underexpose the ground layer would work. How did you light up the ground?
Thanks Jim. I had a pretty wide LED flashlight to get to the falls about 200 feet away. I did want to get some foreground though. I'm not that great with Photoshop yet, I have CS2 and LR4. Still learning. This is pretty raw, only converted to B&W. There was barely any wind and it was 20 degrees. I had some shot with my breath mist in them, so those wouldn't work. What little wind I had blew my mist into the shot/light painting.
Nice one, Dave. I agree with the others, regarding the foreground. There are many ways to handle this in Photoshop. It's also easy to blend in parts of lighter exposed images using masks. That's where I started in Photoshop, for my astrophotos. You'll get a lot of mileage learning to use masks.
