I wanted to do a night shoot and try my hand at doing night panoramas, night HDR and some long exposure shots of anything spinning with coloured lights, e.g. Ferris wheel at night. The only Ferris wheel I know of is at Luna Park, Milson’s Point. As luck would have it, just as we setup for the shot, the Ferris wheel stopped rotating and closed for the night.
I took 3 exposures for this HDR (-1, 0, +1). I then tone mapped with Photomatix Pro. The water did not come out very well, there was some noise in the shadow areas. I selected an exposure that had the best reflections and brightest colours in the water. I imported into CS4 as a layer, added a mask and with a very soft brush with an opacity of around 50%, carefully painted out the bits of the water that did not look good.
Selective colouring, I exported it from LR 2.5 to CS4 and duplicated it. I converted top layer image to BW and I applied a mask to it. Using my Wacom tablet I set the opacity set to about 50%, selected a big soft brush. I then slowly painted out just the puddle of water to reveal the colours of the bottom layer.
This one was taken from Milson’s Point adjacent to Luna Park’s Ferris wheel. This is actually 2 exposures blended together. The 2 towers of the Luna Park entrance were badly blown out when I used matrix metering. I selected 2 exposures and exported them to CS4 as layers. I applied a mask and painted out the sky and water on the top layer to reveal the colours from the layer beneath.
Lastly, I did a 180³ night panorama. I decided that the best spot to create the panorama was from Kirribilli which will includes the Sydney Opera House, the city skyline and Sydney Harbour Bridge. It was a real shame that some of the lights on the bridge were not working. This panorama consisted of 8 individual shots taken in portrait mode, stitched together with CS4 and tweaked in LR 2.
