Night

2018-08-30
approx. 22:00
Canon EOS Rebel T3
EF75-300mm 
Manual mode
30.0 seconds
f/16
ISO 100
80mm focal length
Stabilized on car roof rack (no tripod)

2018-10-27
21:46
Canon EOS Rebel T3
EF-S18-55mm
30.0 seconds
f/4.5
ISO 1600
18 mm focal length

Write-up, first picture: I had to stay fairly late at Rocky Flight Ops for my work study job on the evening of Thursday, August 30. I had been seeing some lighting to the south of Billings while putting airplanes away, and a couple big flashes caught my eye while driving out of the parking lot at around 9:45, so I spontaneously decided to pull over next to Airport Road on top of the Rims and try to take some pictures.

I didn't have a tripod, and so I knew I would need to stabilize my camera in order to get good pictures in the darkness. Fortunately, my car's roof rack works pretty well for propping up the camera, so I parked with my car nose-east (perpendicular to the southern direction in which I wanted to shoot) and did just that. The lightning was fairly sporadic, maybe a flash or two a minute, so I knew I would need a longer exposure to capture the strikes. I set my camera (in Shutter Priority mode) to ISO 100, the slowest possible shutter speed (30 seconds), focused on the city lights, and took several 30-second exposed pictures, one immediately after another, hoping to catch a lightning strike somewhere in one of the 30-second windows. I ended up with several pictures of nothing but city lights because the lightning was sporadic, but eventually got a a picture of a lightning strike, seen below:

I used Lightroom to de-haze a bit, and I think I also reduced the exposure, so the glow from both the lightning and the city lights is even more prominent in the raw photo, such that the entire picture almost looked to be bathed in a glowing purplish-brown haze. I didn't like how purple, glow-y, and slightly blown out the city and lightning were in this picture (the camera automatically set the aperture to f/5.6), so I switched to manual mode, kept the same ISO and shutter speed, but increased aperture to f/16.0 to define the lightning more clearly, both by reducing the glow and blow-out effect, and by increasing depth of field to sharpen the focus of both the lightning and city lights. After many, many more 30-second pictures of just city lights while waiting for a lightning strike, my patience paid off again (see lightning picture at top of post).

I used Lightroom on this picture to increase the exposure 1.75 stops--this was initially a balancing act between defining the thinner tendrils of lighting branching off of the main bolt, and not blowing out the bright white lights on the left side of the picture, but I solved the problem by applying a gradient filter to the bottom fourth of the picture (up to the horizon) with reduced exposure to dim the bright city lights somewhat. I also used the de-haze tool, and increased contrast by +10 (per Dave's recommendations for a general baseline raw conversion). This picture turned out much better than the previous one (apparent even right after taking the picture, looking at the raw image in playback on the camera), mainly because I found a better balance between aperture, shutter speed and ISO by using manual mode.

Second picture: During our shoot at the upper terraces at Mammoth Hot Springs on the second Yellowstone trip, I didn't have a tripod, so I was looking for every opportunity to stabilize my camera with or against something else. I ended up using the vertical posts of the walkway railing many times, with occasional success. Then I had the idea to brace my camera against the walkway itself. In order to do this effectively, I had to hold my camera down at a more or less fixed angle (so that the flat bottom of the body was against the walkway boards, creating the most stability), which limited my ability to shoot upwards towards the sky and stars. I was at the end of the long walkway taking pictures of the moon through the steam, when I looked back and saw the walkway extending back with nice lines of convergence. Dave was walking along the walkway and I asked him to stand still for 30 seconds looking up at the stars while I took his picture. He obliged (doing a very good job) and the picture turned out pretty well. Because of the aforementioned issues limiting the angle of my camera (since I didn't have a tripod), the bottom half of the picture was full of walkway, with the bottom third dark, blurry, and pointless, so I cropped heavily into the upper left of the picture, putting Dave on the right line of thirds. I changed some settings in Lightroom (for example increasing contrast, clarity, and dehaze, as well as lightening lights and darkening darks, in order to bring out the stars in the sky). I further darkened and blurred the foreground (post-crop) to make it less distracting, and I also increased the saturation and luminance of the reds to draw attention to Dave's hat. Overall, I wish I could've had more sky in the shot, but I'm happy with how the composition turned out, especially after the crop.