Long Exposure Landscapes

Even more purpose for my blog! Amazing!

      Today's post is about landscapes. Specifically, it is about landscapes that I took for my "Intro to Digital Photography" class.  We were supposed to emulate a specific photographers style, and initially I was going to go with Ansel Adams, the famous mountain landscape photographer, but there aren't any mountains around here, so that one is out.

      So I was sort of out of luck on a style to be inspired by, but after talking to Guy Rhodes last week, and seeing some of his cityscape and landscape pictures on his blog (http://guyrhodes.com/blog/), I decided to at least try to get some sort of a feel similar to his.

      Now these first few are in color, but I honestly prefer them in black and white, as I usually do with landscapes of any sort. I am supposed to present 4 landscape images for my class, but I am going to count the color and black and white renditions of these images as just 1, as I would like a comparison of the two.

       Last Saturday night I couldn't sleep, so I went out and drove up to Lake Michigan at 2:30 in the morning. It really was pretty amazing to be on the beach in 20 degree weather, with the lake completely frozen and covered in snow. It was very surreal.

     This one here I actually prefer the color version, as you get some of the nuances in the sky caused by the many different colored lights in the refinery there. This one, however, I had to shoot at f/2 with my 35mm DX lens, so it doesn't have the sharpness that the other pictures have, as I can't go past about f/4 without super heavy vignetting.
    This one is a slightly farther back version of the first one, without the darker band of sky at the top.

I am quite impressed by the dynamic range on this image. This was with my 80-200mm lens, at ISO 1600, f/8.0, with a 6 second exposure. I was surprised at how much light there was for the camera to gather at 2:30 in the morning, and the sky cleared out enough to even see a couple stars. Lovely.

This last one I got the idea for actually as I was driving back, and I had just passed a pull-off, so I pretty much hit the brakes hard, then reversed back there, set up my tripod in the middle of the road, and hit my remote. Now just imagine, I am out all by myself at 3:30 in the morning, and it just so happens that the one car that I see just happens to be right there, in the middle of my shot, driving on the road, and would have run into my camera if I hadn't stopped the exposure and moved.

Afterwards I realized that it would be pretty awesome to have some headlight or taillight trails going all the way down that road, so I stood there waiting for a car for about 10 minutes, but alas, none came. I probably could have realized how daft it was to wait for a second car at 3:30 in the morning, but oh well.





Now last night my girlfriend suddenly realized that she needed some pictures for this assignment too, so we went out to try to get something with her idea, which was a black and white image of the Theater here in town. Now this was very difficult, as it was ridiculously foggy (like can't see out of my apartment window foggy), but we went out anyways, and I am glad of it. I took my camera too, and I got this shot below, and I think it is one of my favorites:

I love the composition of it, with the repeating patterns and the leading lines and the dynamic contrast, so I am fairly proud of it, and it is the last picture that I am choosing for this assignment.

Now for the assignment, we were supposed to try to emulate a landscape photographer, so I chose Ansel Adams, but obviously in Indiana there aren't any mountains or hills. This is unfortunate, but I do have one image that I took over Christmas Break that I feel gets fairly close. However, we aren't allowed to use previous images for any of the assignments, so this picture is here for the sake of the Blog.

 Ansel Adams strove to achieve dark skies and bright snow on his peaks, and I think that this got fairly close. I'm not good enough with Photoshop or Lightroom to get the sky completely black, but I'm not sure if I would want that, as it would kill the snow plumes that I really like.

Bonus image! This is what happens when you stop a DX lens down anywhere past around f/2 on a Full Frame body (As I was saying something about when talking about my assignment images.) Also, it shows off the absolutely appalling amount of oil spots there are on my sensor. I really need to send it in to Nikon for a cleaning...

Anyways

Thanks for reading,

Kevin