Posted December 19th, 2010

Ghosts’ Christmas

If you are not on my short list of Christmas mail recipients this is for you, the online version of my Christmas card I send to friends and relatives. I wish you all a wonderful Christmas and a New Year that satisfies body and soul. The image is one I took a year ago on the same bitingly cold, windy evening as the January 9th, 2010 Feature Photo. It actually is the product of 3 varied exposures combined in HDR software. I had intended to arrive on the scene before darkness set in to photograph with the twilight sky as background but I cannot seem to adapt to how early the light extinguishes at this time of year and I was too late. To my eyes it was totally dark when I set up this composition. My purpose in using HDR was to avoid blowing out the colours of the lights while providing good exposure for the buildings and snow. The light that was revealed in the sky was a surprise. But the levels boost that effected this also resulted in intolerable noise and artifacting ... I should have made an additional very long exposure to better capture that dark part of the image. It took a lot of work in Photoshop to clean it up as you see here but I am quite happy with the result. This is essentially the photo I envisioned had I been shooting in twilight.
Pentax K10D, Tamron AF 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 DiII LD IF Macro @25mm, f/9.5, 3 exposures to 20 sec, 1 with flash