Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Selective focus

This is the shot I wanted. The shot I planned for and calculated carefully. This isn’t the shot that came back from the photo finisher. The photo technician keyed in on the tree and set the printer to make a beautifully rendered picture of the light gray bark in all its gnarly detail.

Which totally blew out the sky. No stars.

Fortunately, I had a scan of the negative on CD and knew the information would be there for the sky and stars. Some massive levels adjustments brought the stars back and rendered the tree as a shadowy foreground element.

Sometimes you can’t see the stars for the trees.

Exposure: 480 seconds at f5.6, 100 ISO film. Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2006 James Jordan.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice! I just love shots of the stars like this one. Cool tree too!

James said...

Hi, Stacey. Thanks for the kind comment!