A Free Preview of My March 12th LIVE! Presentation (Patreon)

This is one of the presentations I will be making at the 2022 Out of Chicago LIVE! Online Photography Conference. I hope you can attend, as there will be more than 60 other photographers presenting, like Daniel Kordan, David Kingham, Rachel Jones Ross, Adam Gibbs, Aaron King and Marybeth Kinzenski. Everything will be recorded, so you can have access to the presentations for up to one year.

Even if you cannot attend, because you are one of my Patreon supporters, I'm giving you a free preview of key "slides" in my presentation:

Here is a comparison of three raw images from a nightscape photography session I did last year in the remote Upper Cathedral Valley area of Capitol Reef National Park. Some people do not like to use artificial lighting in their nightscape photography (they think it is "unnatural"), so I'm showing an alternative, which is a blended exposure (using overhead starlight and the Astronautical Twilight). The left image is the silhouette you get with a single, 20-second exposure (f/2.8, ISO 8000). The middle image is a 4X longer exposure (at 80 seconds) in order to pick up recognizable detail in the foreground features. Notice that this longer exposures blows out the sky detail. In the right image, the sky from the first image is blended (in Photoshop layers) with the foreground in the middle image to produce a "natural" looking blend (the image is still somewhat "raw", as the sky has not yet received any post processing).

Frankly, that 3rd blended image may look "natural" to some, but I personally think it lacks some artistic "drama".

This is why I like my Low Level Lighting (LLL). It adds the artistic drama — all within a single exposure. However, I realize that for some, it may appear too artificial or unnatural to them. That is why I often add a blend of the natural light with my LLL exposure to give it the benefits of both — the natural and the dramatic.

One note of caution: Capitol Reef has recently joined four other national parks (Arches, Canyonlands, Zion and Grand Teton) in prohibiting the use of artificial lighting (even the use of my much less invasive LLL). Despite these bans, most national parks, most national monuments, most state parks and virtually all BLM lands do allow artificial lighting.