Yosemite Under a Full Moon

All comments welcome. This is another shot from my Cross-Continent

Road Trip. I arrived in Yosemite shortly before midnight after

spending the day in San Francisco. The full moon was just breaking

over the opposing valley wall as I arrived.

Very nicely done, my friend. Some great elements in this image, and each is nicely show-cased and tied together. Unique perspective at a very iconic location. Good work! Cheers! Chris

excellent work, congrats!

Fantastic photo.

That's a great photo, I've been out there twice lately and the falls is just a trickle, although it might not appear quite so small on this long of an exposure. It's really interesting how you get that rainbow band across the middle of the waterfall.

Chris, Ovidiu, Javed, thank you all.

 

Adam, I was there June 19th. There was quite a torrent of water back then. You could hear the roar of the waterfall through the still night air for a fair distance.

Brilliant photo!

An original, and highly sucessful, exploration of a much photographed location. Well done. Congradulations on an excellent photograph.

Neil

Unique and very well done. That rainbow really puts this photo over the top.

It is always good to see a classic subject from a new perspective. Well done and inspiring.

Thanks all.

Love the rainbow and the sky. All the elements work nicely together.

Sorry I missed this the first time around. Just surfin PN and came across this really sweet shot of the Falls. Nice Ian, very nice...RAY

Eric, Raymond, thanks!

Ian, absolutely excellent. I love the star trails and the fact that they are circling and not just running diag. Also love the "moonbow" colors in the mist of the falls. How did the camera deal with noise at this length of exposure? Did you have to run tons of NR on this?

Jeff, thanks for your enthusiastic comments.

 

I had absolutely no problems with noise. I have not run this web version through NR nor have I run the original file from which I have made a 12x18 test print.

 

This may be because:

 

1. I allowed the Long Exposure NR to do its work.

 

It is obnoxious to take a 40 minute exposure and then have to wait 40 minutes for the Long Exposure NR. But, I have tested it and it is worth waiting. I can NOT get as good a result by doing the NR in post-production -- particularly if one is trying to maintain detail.

 

2. I adopt an expose to the right (ETTR) routine and it does help with both tonal separations and noise. It is much, much better to push the exposure down in PP than to pull an exposure up. Read a good article on the concept here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml

 

I do normally adopt such a routine of exposing to the right. But, in this case, I also had a very fortunate accident. I dozed off during the exposure and it ran about 20-30% longer than intended!!

 

This shot was about 1 to 1.5 stops more exposed than the other 3 versions I photographed. I was worried I would not be able to bring back the highlights in the raw conversion. But, the only place where there isn't detail is the very apex of the falls. It also allowed the colour in the moonbow to come out more.

 

Anyways, I learned an important lesson about just how far I SHOULD be pushing my expose to the right.

 

I took a couple of long exposures of Lake Tenaya at night and they have enough noise that I have run NR on the sky portion. They were not as fully ETTR as this was -- so, that is probably the key here.

 

I hope that helps.

 

Ian

 

P.S. I planned to post the Lake Tenaya shot soon anyways. So, I'll do that now. You can see that it is a similar situation (the next night at roughly the same time actually) and a similar final tonality as presented. So, the fact that I had to deal with noise here is due to my not having as thoroughly "over"-exposed the original RAW file.