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| f/22.0, 8.0s, ISO 100 |
So we were out on George Square armed with tripods to capture some night shots. I rather foolishly came with only my 50mm standard lens so was having to back off a long way to get anything in the frame - note to self when shooting scenery in future make sure you have a wide angle lens on you.
But anyway most of the shots were taken on f/22.0, ISO 100 at 5s to try and capture motion and light trails - the aperture was as small as possible and the sensitivity as low as possible to allow the shutter speed to be as slow as possible. Even then 5s isn't very long, but any longer and the images, particularly the wheel, would just blow out.
The top 2 images are actually constructed from multiple shots using the LIGHTEN blend mode in Photoshop.
PS Files > Scripts > Load Files into Stack...
In newer versions of CS I think you can do this directly from Bridge by selecting multiple images, then going to Tools > PS > Load Files into PS Layers. However this doesn't seem to be a feature in CS3.
So once you have multiple images layered on top of each other, select a layer, change the blend mode from NORMAL to LIGHTEN from the drop down menu at the top of the layers pallette. What this does is bring through the only the lighter/brighter elements from the image, so you can layer up the light trails from all the different photos. DARKEN as you can probably imagine does the opposite.
The interesting thing about the bottom image is the 'star' effect around light sources, which I noticed you only get on a slow exposure.
Ok moving onto the subject of flash, one of the things we discussed was slow sync or rear sync flash, which fires the flash at the end of the exposure rather than at the beginning. This can be useful for capturing the subject at the end of the light trail rather than at the beginning. On my 350D this is referred to as 2nd-curtain sync, and can be changed from 1st-curtain sync under the Custom Function Setting C.Fn-9 (See p.150 in the manual). Below is also an interesting article explaining the difference. I'll try and have a play with this and post the results.
http://www.digital-photography-school.com/slow-sync-flash
One other tip from DS: the three key things you need to know in PS are LAYERS, MASKS and BLEND MODES.
