Cape Columbine Lighthouse

[dewarp]

Our camera club organised a long-weekend outing to Paternoster on the West Coast. There are lots of small fishing vessels there, and we spent some time doing light-painting of those.

The weather was brilliant and a good portion of the time there were amazing cloud formations. So, other than for the light-painting episodes, my photography was mainly about capturing interesting skies.

Whilst there I decided to have a go at the Cape Columbine Lighthouse. As many of you know, I "make images" rather than just "take photographs". For this image we selected our location about 45 minutes before sunset. The location was forced upon us to some extent, because the clouds to the South had all but vanished. I set up my tripod and composed the scene that I thought I needed. I then took over forty images through a half-hour period finishing just after sunset. The cloud formation in the fourth image was fantastic, and I was fairly sure that this would form the basis of my output image. However, towards the end of my photographing session I came to the conclusion that I had composed my image too tightly, and I now wanted to include more of the sea - a more panoramic view. So just after the official sunset I swung my camera Westwards and took another single shot. This shot was used in the final image, and it also forced me to use the image of the lighthouse taken just before this shot. So I didn't get to use the fabulous sky that I expected to use. (The reason is that the differences in white balance and position of clouds would make combining the two images a huge Photoshop exercise.)

We packed up and started heading for home. Just then the light in the lighthouse was switched on! So we returned to where we had been and I took a few underexposed images of the light with its beam.

And so I went on to fabricate the image shown below. The sky comes from the last two shots taken just after sunset. The foreground is produced from one of the earlier shots expanded to fill the wider frame. The lighthouse itself was obtained from one of the middle shots where the contrast looked good. The two birds were obtained from two of the middle images. The light and beam came from one of the underexposed images.

The lot was combined in Photoshop CS2 with some assistance from Topaz plugins.

C&C Welcome.

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regards - Peter

[sury]

Very surreal image Peter. I meant it in a most complimentary sense.
Excellent post processing. Thank you for that background information.
Are these long enough exposures that you need tripod? Just curious.

Sury

[dewarp]

Are these long enough exposures that you need tripod? Just curious.

Sury

Thanks Sury

Basically, for these kinds of shot, I set up the camera on a tripod and use a cable release not to prevent blur, but to make it easier to align the images during post-processing. In this particular case I probably didn't need to do this - but you don't always know in advance. In some of my work I have used up to a dozen images on different layers, and then misalignment can ruin the quality of the output. (Maybe not on this size of image, but certainly when printed out large the faults become obvious.)

regards - Peter

[bakubo]

Nice photo!

Considering that you take multiple photos and then use several to make a single image you might also be interested in this technique to get much more resolution:

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=8921

[the_hefay]

beautiful composite image.

[Birma]

Wonderful picture. Great colours in the sky and I like the lighthouse beam.