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Night Photography Critique

welcome. Everyone were at Creative Live very early in the morning for night photographers. I will just mention that we're usually just getting to bed right about now, but 9 a.m. Seattle time and we Matt and I are so excited to be back and recap our night photography week about a month and 1/2 ago, each one of the members of national parks. At night, there's five of us. We each gave a class than filled up a whole week with night photography tips, tricks, solutions and adventures. And we're just really, really super excited to be back and look at your images. Just a little recap of what we what we did that night Photography week I kicked off. The week was sort of our fundamentals class, giving you a good overview of all sort of aspects of night photography. We focused a lot on the gear, but we looked at sort of cityscapes, car trails, and then we went out to a Mount Rainier and kind of struggled with and talked about how we deal with weather, right? That was an overriding factor there on...

Tuesday of night photography Week, Day two we had Chris Nicholson are sort of in house expert on national national parks. He wrote the book on it. Hey gave sort of his scouting report and the essential tools besides sort of the gear things that you think of. He gave sort of his knowledge on that, and they went out to the Olympic National Park, which was super fun. The whole crew camped out there for a few nights, and they had much better weather than the rest of us. Midweek, At the halfway point we took, we shared with you the some of the most exciting parts of night photography is when we can get out to those dark skies. And we had Lance Kym IQ and they were doing Star Point star trails Milky Way, and they had a Chinese rocket go through on the day on day one as well. So that was a pretty special night. If you haven't checked out that class, definitely that's a worthy one, for sure. Then we got moving right along. We had Tim Cooper, and he gave his light painting light writing skills as well as he really delved deep into the post processing he really took. See how we can start where their images and then either using HDR techniques or just kind of getting the most out of those dark sky or light painting images. How weaken, blend and get the best out of those and then wrapping it up. We had our very own Matt Hill, co founder of National Parks at night. He kind of really, really, I think, blew a lot of people's minds by the creative aspects of doing night portraiture. Not just her. Your typical pictures at night, but really bending time dilating time and really see what we can do when we take a portrait for seconds or even minutes. So really, really fun. And I really was super proud to be involved in such a diverse class. So if you haven't seen it, come check it out at the end of it. We really asked you guys, we really believe in sharing. That's so much part of the fun at night photography. No one should do this alone, right? We should go out together, whether it's with your friends or with a workshop or what have you, but really the fun in photography, Weatherby Day or Night is sharing and bouncing ideas off of each other. So we really did a called action and asked you guys to submit your images and we're gonna be looking at in today's to our class. We're gonna be looking at the over a ton of submissions. We had 50,000 viewers a night photography. We didn't even know that many people knew about night photography personally. So very excited about that. But we're gonna look a ton of images from you in the audience as well as for all the people that submitted it from all over the world. Pretty cool stuff. So now why don't we kick it off? Kind of what it's been a month and 1/ anything new that you've sort of been like that inspired you. And from that night photography week that you've now been experimenting with? Yes. Yeah, well, I've been looking at some of the people who have been submitted images, and I realized it was time to go outside my comfort zone again. So one of the things I might have mentioned during my talk was I don't particularly love compositing, but I think it's just a personal thing. So I'm working currently. I haven't shown any of the work yet, but I'm working on doing some crazy composites instead of doing everything in camera, which is a big change for me. But it's an experiment, so that gives me permission to do anything I want, cause it's just an experiment. It's not like I'm being graded on it, right? So and that's some of the most exciting times. I think in photography is when we are experimenting and going out side of our comfort zone. It can be scary, but we can kind of take that nervous energy. But scary is good. It's Kerry's good, especially in this in October. Anyone else hear anyone else been experimenting with anything? Whether it's also again could be that night Photography is new to use. The whole thing is an experiment that's that's as well something to talk about. Okay, I've been experimenting with Well, obviously it's not. Photography. Long exposure, exposure seconds. 20 seconds. How can I integrate using flash until, like Mike photography like you were saying portraiture expect important. There's many different ways. I let Matt feel the portraiture question for using flash. Is that safe number one? Do you own a late meter. You should start by getting a light meter, because nothing helps you understand how to use flash faster, then knowing how much light is coming out of the flash. That'll save you time. That will save you battery energy, and you'll know a lot more about the quantity of the late. Not necessarily the quality, the quality you judge with your eyes. What light shapers you put on those flashes, but at least you can get past the technical part of Do I have a good exposure? That's step one. Step two would be to get your ambient exposure first. Get all of that. And if you want the flash subject to pop out a little bit more, drop that Emery exposure by half a stop or stop and then put the proper amount of flash on your subject and the person or the thing that you let with the flash will pop out. The background will still look well lit, but it won't be competing. Exposure wise with that, so flash will be here and exposure will be here. If you start there and start experimenting, you'll do really great. Great question. Excellent. Yeah, great way to kick off more experimentations. It's really new for me. And so I'm just excited. Just toe have another tool in my toolbox to be able to experiment and see what's out there because we live in such a great area that there's all kinds of opportunities. Yeah, it's funny. I think both Matt and I have been doing night photography for 15 20 years, and you know, when I when we share our knowledge with people, it's like what? We'd love you to be a night photographer, but also these. The tools that we're giving you the knowledge that we're giving you is valuable. I like to say it's it's a valuable piece of information in your camera back because every type of photographer can be using these long exposures to be creative. Look at wedding photographers. One of the most popular shots they do is sort of that at night or at twilight, when they have the couple, either right a name with sparklers or that's nine photography, right? So if you can have this knowledge, if you could have at least a basic understanding of this knowledge, then it will help elevate your shots, whether your travel photographer wedding photographer, portrait photographer, etcetera. Anyone else? Alright, so I've been experimenting with using Neil lights. I mean, the neon lights that you see on the I don't know. For example, the yes, uh, not like me. Using them like experimenting with them in the places like the open neon lights, science and everything You live in Miami. Uh, but my question is like, how do I get to do a photo with neon lights if I am going to use a long exposure? But I just want, like, the light of the new lights. And if you do a long exposure, you're going to have, like, all of the other lights of the CD and stuff, and I like to do portrait's. So I would like to know what could I do to have, like, control with any lights? You're probably getting into a situation where when you're highlights will burn out and you want the other parts to also be exposed. At the same time, you may have to take two photographs and blend them together later. That's that's probably the easiest way to do this. Otherwise, you have to bring a whole bunch more late toe, let everything else, which is possible to do. You have friends that like this stuff, too, because there's a way to do it afterwards, and there's a way to do it before. If you bring a lot of extra light, you can do the portrait lighting near there. You can use the neon light probably like as a fill. Just a suggestion, like as a cool color. Fill right and use the flash for your main one. Because the flash has two purposes. One is to provide controllable light, but number two to freeze the subject that when you use a continuous light, people just can't hold. Still, they wrote their rock we can. Our hearts are beating, blood is moving. We move the flash stops. That gives the perception of sharpness right. If you bring extra lights, you can go out into those other areas and late them up. It could be a additional flashes. Could be flashlights could be high powered flashlights, like those 10 million loom in ones. Or you can wait for the exposure. So if you do the flash and just that simple light up front and then control the highlights that way and take a second shot in. Either do or don't have your subject move. Then you can layer in that other stuff by masking out the portrait area and blending those two exposures together later. That way, it'll look like the way you want it. If you can't capture in camera, okay, I'm gonna try it. I also might suggest also playing with them at twilight because that's when also agree that red neon lights and the ambient light from the sky is also gonna blend in and you won't have like, 3 to 5 to seven stops difference between the two. So you do have, you know, at least 30 minutes, you know, appearing in the Washington Seattle area of that sort of that blew our to civil twilight time. And that's when you need to be there. Well beforehand, setting up your shot and then work quickly and efficiently. But you'll get a nice blend of that Will. They'll both be sort of, you know, of the same sort of lighting so or just a little bit higher or lower. Twilight happens before the sun rises. To think we've got a question from the World Wide Web. So let's feel that one experimenting with tail lights. Streaks on the highway from photo D. J Thank you. Give. You've done well. We did this in the first class, the fundamentals class. And this is some of the most exciting styles of night. Photography is doing those those car lights. He just asked the tail lights, you know, But oftentimes, if you're just doing, it's hard to just do daylight. So we have to deal with tail lights and headlights on Headlights are going to be, you know, 4 to 5 times brighter than those tail lights. So my main thought on experimented that so, though, is getting sort of to a good vantage point where we can kind of see three shape that these lights are making, whether they're like over a highway and kind of going around one of those turnoffs that are going circular or there, or if you can't get to a high vantage point. There also could be wonderful compositions that can be on a low and on street level if you're on a busy enough street and you have a lot of cars passing you that way as well. So we want to thinking about the vantage point and also thinking about, um, the time okay, and it really we want the cars to be moving. We don't want them standing still, so we want them to be moving at a fairly good clip. So often times, I'll be waiting at that stoplight for I'll be waiting for the cars to a good amount of cars to kind of come through a good tool toe have, if you're going to do it s a lot of car trails is to have. That's the one time that I bring with my neutral density filters I don't use my neutral density filters out in the dark sky area because it's dark enough. But if I want to shoot in Las Vegas, Seattle or you know cities, then I might turn put that neutral density filter on, and that'll take. Usually, I like at least a three stop oftentimes, a six stop on and that'll get me those bright enough trails and the red ones definitely are look nice. That's a wonderful complementary color, too, hopefully the blue skies, but again complementing that with the white headlights coming through as well. And the thing you just have to look out for is that those white ones don't burn out as much. So that's keeping that balance. And you take a lot of shots. Experiment, because each image is gonna look different because each image has different cars coming through, which is also another one other point. I love it when the buses and the trucks come through and we get different layers in different colors of lights. So really timing. You know, Vantage point neutral density filters were close altogether and experiment with the time we have one more question from the audience. Let's take a look at that. This one is color. Joe's been using dollar tree binder clear sheets for a while, finally bought some proper gels a few months ago and finally get around to using them. Jerry, that's a great idea. I mean, using whatever you can to create, in effect is the art of experimentation, right. But it looks like you've you've gone up a level and you've gotten some some proper gels, right? So it is necessarily a question. So I'm gonna kind of guess at what you're saying. If you're using gels for creative color effects, that's fantastic. You're going to add life and popped. Whatever you're doing. The other thing that you could do is trying to balance light sources, which is another like This is, I think, the Holy Grail of night photography. If you're looking at, like, really technical night photography, where Let's see if you go into a city scene. There's many different late temperatures happening from, like the ambient light sources that happen that are out there. Making them match is really close to impossible. Unless you climb up, you bring a ladder and new gel every one of those light sources, which I have done like a crucial shoot. I have climbed up there. I've brought trash bags to block off the worst offenders and jelled the other ones. You can do that, or you can gel the flashes or the flashlights that you have with you. So it's good to find the right color correction gels and creative color gels. Also to augment or correct light sources that you have a good job right, so either complement the colors like you know, or contracts the colors with what's going on in the scene. That's a very important the scene could already have that going on, or it's on us to kind of bring those colors to play. Excellent. So I think I want to move on to another question. So what have you been struggling with? And, you know, I'm gonna ask you first gave what you've been struggling with. Nothing. Well, with experimentation comes struggles. And that's that battle. That journey, let's say, is half the fun, right? We're climbing up that hill to get to that peak of knowledge. But the journey is actually often more fun than the view at the at the top. So it's interesting. That's But I just let a night walk in New York City a couple weeks ago and the students that were that signed up for this night walk none of them, but try pots. And I was like, You know what? You did sign up for the night photography walk, Did you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're here, I think One person at a table top tripod. But I was like, at first I was like, Okay, the rules are you need a tripod classes over. We're not How can we walk? Then it was Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You know, this is a challenge. Let's take it with sees it and let's see what we can do it. And so the challenge of the night I said we're gonna have actually was so liberating not to live within sort of the rules that we, you know, it's good night photography. There is a lot of knowledge, a lot of rules that we need to sort of abide by. But the fun part is weaken. We can ask what if and challenge those rules. So I said I saw also night. I went from this like no tripods to wait a minute. This is brilliant. Let's go find all the tripods in New York City. So we were using buildings, pulls, mailboxes, the ground, and it just opened up all these compositions, you know, that we would have seen if we were just walking around. And the struggle with the tripod is that I always don't want to be six feet above sexy level, right? You know, I wanna you know one thing I always tell you know, our student that we share with our students is before you even set up your camera or your tribe would walk around the scene, right? Is the shot is that the shot isn't always with your legs extended. It could be down here. It could be. You know, over here, you know, all these, all these different places, you know? So it was really It was such a liberating shoot that I think that And this is a little secret. Maybe that we're giving out. But I think national parks the night should have a yearly no tripods photo walk that will offer in New York City. What do you think about that? You excited? Heck, yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So and the other struggles that we have here in the audience Well, it's funny that you say the no tripods because one of the things that I travel and do travel photography. And so sometimes I'll bring the tripod. Sometimes I won't. So it's actually getting myself out there with the tripod when I'm in places where I don't feel like setting it up. Or just that, um, really understanding the full power of using a tripod, even when it's not totally dark as well. And and so really just being able to run through my mind quickly of what I can do with that tripod it's, I think there are a lot of, um, we get sort of weighted down by the whole tripod, even though it can be a really simple tool. But a sometimes it's too heavy, too bulky for us to bring with. You know, oftentimes I know plenty of people, and I'm a culprit as well that we go on a trip and the tripod stays in. There was suitcase the whole time. We don't take it for a walk, and that's a shame, you know? So having tripod that it's fun to use, you know, and easy to use and lightweight that you could bring it with everywhere will inspire you really play with time, whether it is the day, you know, or the night. And that's ah, you know that that is again, a challenge that we have to over. We have to get over that hurdle, right? So I think we have one question from the World Wide Web again about what they have been struggling with. I've been experimenting. This is April s. I've been experimenting with intentional camera movement of quite a bit in daylight hours and now finding ways to use in my low light NYTPhotos too. Any suggestions? Oh, yes. Camera movements. I started the experimenting with camera movements because of a mistake. During an exposure, I zoomed my lens accidentally. And then that was when it's like things went off in my head. I'm like, Oh, I could move the camera or like, I had a three way head and I turned my head during an exposure, and suddenly all these city lights had a 90 degree arc on them. But the flash exposure had the people burned in. Um, I think that those experiments lead to things like this. What are things that others they're zooming we talked about. There's panning your tripod head. Um, if you have a head that goes only side, decide if you can, you know, lock it in three different directions. Try just turning one access at a time if you have a ball head. It's harder to do that because the ball head moves in all directions at once. Uh, maybe there's a shot that I had when I worked at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Um, I took my tripod and held it like a gimbal, and I had the interval ometer in my hand, and I was following a group of people who had lanterns and their hands down by their knees, and I just kept pressing the bowl button and walking behind them like this. So they were kind of steady because I was moving at the same pace they were. But all of the colorful foliage on the trees was passing by, and it was lit up by these kerosene lanterns. So moving the tripod to is a great way, and now there's There's cheap Gimbels everywhere. You could take one of those video Gimbels, put your photo camera on it and use that either the brush list, motorized ones or the mechanical Gimbels and try doing that, too. That might be a lot of fun, especially, and there's another crazy it might head just explodes with possibilities. Maybe if you had, like, uh, an armed with a light on it, and the light was always in the same position. You're following something, so you're constantly illuminating something with the same power of light as you're moving with it. How's that for some ideas like that? I just like to add that, you know, with those so many movements that as we're experimenting with that will definitely dip our waters and chaos right, which is which is super fun. But I want, you know, a new hashtag should be, you know, control the chaos. Eso creo que so as much as you will experiment with all sorts of different stuff, but then find out. What's that? Like? You said that single movement sometimes could be more powerful if we can. If we confined, if our minds confined some some stability, some something to rest our eyes on within the chaos, then that makes it a better a better image right there. There has to be some reference to something that we know to create comfort in the eyes of the viewer. Uh, otherwise, it's completely abstract. Abstraction is a different form of art, right? So you could create abstract photographic art. Or you can have something that has a positive references, something we immediately recognize play with both of them. Excellent. Everyone else in the audience. Any struggles? Yeah, I really struggle with wanting to go out when it's raining back in the most fun time. Seattle. It's every other day, right? That's true. That's a struggle. You know what I love about it? I love that the rain changes the reflectivity of everything. At that point, it's really great to just get some rain pants and get down low Neil with your camera. Get your camera lenses close to the pavement as possible, and all of those light sources turn into really long reflections in front of you. It's so worth it. If you get a nice ring cover for your like, even a plastic bag will do it. But there's plenty of commercially available ring covers. Just put over your camera while you're doing it. You have to worry about that. But getting out there, you'll make images that you love, and you'll probably go out and shoot in the rain more often once you start getting those beautiful reflections all over. Yeah, save the umbrella for the camera. You wear the mark of the rain gear, but save it most times at Matt saying that most times at night, you know, whatever during the rain snow, what have you. Those could be such fun experimental because it changes the way that we see the world, right? So but protecting yourself in the gear is paramount, so but a simple umbrella I think you know you can get the high tech stuff and several bell. Well, good. Unless, of course you're facing it. It's blowing sideways. In that case, just wait it out. But, you know, sometimes way you find the awnings outside to shoot under, you know, you go into the cafe and waited out to that proper drizzle time. You know, we're still getting the drops and reflectivity and all that sort of stuff, too. There's also those novelty caps that you put on that our umbrellas. You could put that part that goes around your head on the camera or a little Gaff tape in a number on your tripod leg to So All right, so then I think it's time to jump forward with the critique with critique. And so, um, what are we gonna be looking forward, what we're really looking for in the critique? Like what kind of which are assessment? What's our rules here for? What are we looking for? Well, the images, first and foremost, a willingness to experiment. I know that's not a surprise coming from me, but I mean night photography is, uh, it's not normal, right? It's You have to do something that's harder than just pressing a button, right? I'm not saying daytime photography is simple by any measure, but it's a little lot a bit more complicated, right? Ah, second thing is, if you go out with the intent to focus on a specific technique, that's one of the things we can look for during this critique and that clear intent we want to see. You know, the wonderful thing about photography is that when I set up our shot, you set up your show. You know what you were what vision you're trying to promote, But I always love when at a show or when we're sharing our images and the images out there, and so many people see so many different things to it. They shouldn't see the exact opposite attend. But it can happen. But, you know, obviously that vision should be focused. We should see some sort of a clear intent of what we're trying to portray out there. So and then, lastly, strong composition. Yeah, we love those strong compositions. I was strong. Composition obviously could be a frame filled with lots of energy, and it could be frantic and frantic. And a car lights, stalled star trails, all that's ourself where it could be a quiet moment as well. You know, just under the stars. Just a little bit of the landscape in there. You know both of those equal, strong compositions. You should know immediately. A strong composition is pretty easy to spot. Your eye knows where to go, and it doesn't get trapped in in a place where it really doesn't belong. It has a natural progression through the photograph to the main element of the photograph. And here I will want the linger there and discover more things. That's that's a sign of a strong composition. I think night photographers as a whole are the turtles, right? We take our time, you know, and we really slowly, methodically. We look at our composition. We take a lot of test shots, especially well, doesn't matter. In the brighter in the dark, you know, we take lots of compositions and we're finessing those minuscule movements. You know, whether it's you know, just it could be a incremental movement up down to the side. And we're really studying that image, you know, after I take that picture, I'll really look at the back of the screen for a while and go through sort of, you know, the rule of thirds and just making sure that there's not overhanging branches and all that other stuff like that. So we really take our time. We don't need a 64 gig card when we go out and shoot night for documents were doing time lapse, you know, then you need a lot of the newly alive shots. But oftentimes, when we're doing our dark sky stuff, we're coming home with maybe 5 to 8 setups and you know each one of those setups. We might take us 10 shots to get there, but it's really it's. And this is a wonderful way, I think, to experiment, experience photography. Most of us are going around. Click, click, click, click like remember. But in a minute, you know, with daytime shots, it's a fraction of a second here. We can settle in on that moment and really capture it. Create with it, but also enjoy it. You know, don't also forget when we're under that Milky Way. Yes, half the fun is is seizing, getting into the camera. But the other half is just like, wow, there so few pH places in the world that we can see it these days. Let's just taking it all in. I think that's a perfect Segway for our first photograph. All right, let's do it. You know, so, uh, to meet this this photograph screams now, and that's and that's what we were just talking about. Um, it's the opportunity to be present and to enjoy what's in front of you instead of thinking about what's to come. Well, you know, he might actually be thinking about, you know, reaching the stars. You know, maybe hopping on a starship. But, uh, this is a fantastic portrait because you can see the outlines of person rather clearly, it's hard for a person to sit still for 30 seconds. You can see it here in that it's it's a it's a little bit soft, and that could be due to one of two things and thanks Good Armagh for submitting this image. We really appreciate it. The focus might only be on the astral part of the photograph. Therefore, the foreground may maybe out of focus for one of two reasons. Because of movement or because there could be more depth of field, but with a Milky Way shot. It's hard to stop down, and it looks like this might be a longer focal length also, which means you have even less depth of field. So it would be challenging to get both the person and the Milky Way and focus here, even though it might be desired. It might be technically very hard to achieve if you wanted to get both of them and try this again. You might want to try what's called focus stacking. Take one photo of the person to try and get that person and focus as much as possible. Ah, and you might be able to do that with a little room lighting with flash or something, something gentle, you know, just to keep it crisp and then take a second shot for the Milky Way and blend those two images together. The power of post processing is undeniable. A night photography. Even though we come from roots of getting it all in camera, there's sometimes we're just putting it together afterwards is very, very powerful to show, Uh, I don't know, an intense Teoh tell a story to somebody. I love the colors in this one, too. The light pollution, which we struggled to avoid, is really beautiful. And it's a wonderful, complimenting color to sort of that bluish green dark sky above it. So I really, you know, our eyes actually start down there and then move up around the silhouette and up into the Milky Way. So really good composition, Um, and wonderful color. So great job editing this guy there. Yeah, it looks it's not over processed, you know, that's the struggle with Milky Way images is that way over. Process them because we're just so excited to have him right. We want to make them, like as vibrant and it is and as visible as possible. But that's that is really we have to tone it down. Oftentimes when I do Milky Way stuff will process it and then I'll take it down. Five points 11 tiny tiny little thing and I normally don't nitpick about these would be like little this thing this airplane coming in from the edge is distracting. It pulls the eye here and sort of traps it. I would be attempted to just clone that out so that if this were a final presentation to somebody that they wouldn't be trapped there. Well, they're looking at it that way. They're just kind of going in and around in that nice shape there. Great. So right here we have a lot of lights. Fremont Street, where it says I have I've been here. So this is in Las Vegas, right? I think common off. It's the only Freeman I know. Oh, it's only everyone I know. There could be others. So I was talking about We can see, Obviously the wonderful we have the tail lights, the red headlights right here with white, those air cool. It's actually interesting to see the car through it, right. And that's something we think often times a lot of people ask us is how can if you're walking into the CNN light painting or light writing, how come we can't see it? Well, you've got to be there for half the time. You either have to be lit with flash or flashlight to be in the shot or be in there for, like, half the amount of time. So that's why we're seeing. And I do like that semblance of the ghost car sort of hear. Oftentimes I'll say just kind of show me the trails, but I think it fits. It kind of goes with the Commonwealth colors over here. I like seeing this is a fairly short exposure because we're seeing a solid eight seconds a lot of times what you'll see with If you're a longer exposure, you'll see both the red green, the yellow lights kind of cycle through. So, depending upon how long this light was, they remain solid because I don't see the yellow or the green. I just see I see a little bit. That's actually kind of flare coming into it from there. So I really like the colors compositionally I like. I like this part. I actually don't mind the flare coming in ST Length. Street lights can be so difficult to deal with, and I think we dealt with them fairly well. Here we used a small aperture here that was that's creating those star points, which I think is a better way than than just those streetlight streetlamp blobs of light. There there were. There is a little bit of negative space, obviously up on top here, and this is definitely it looks like it was either dealt with with some HDR or definitely just kind of raising those shadow values. We're trying to show a lot of value, a lot of information in this image, and I think it's a little bit too much, actually, information. I wouldn't mind seeing more darkness in this image. More contrast. War. I don't need to see the information of the these lines right here. I could see if this building was in shadow more than this. I think that would be a little bit better. So if I were to go back into this shot, I would just kind of not process, you know, not try to show as much information and kind of just keep. Remember, it's It's night, you know, it's It is dark, you know? So don't try to reveal everything. There's beauty in the shadows. Can I have something for that? Jump on in. I'm gonna I found a piece of evidence that makes me think this is Las Vegas, because there's a lot of noise thinking it might have been very hot. Uh, also, by seeing all of the stars around the lights, it looks like it was shot around F 11 F 16 that only happens a very small apertures. So if I I don't have a name on this one, if this photographer were to go back and reshoot this, try shooting at 5.6 instead. Uh, number one, maybe. Start points. Yeah, you might. You might not need that. You might not have the noise issue because the exposure will be shorter. Right? And maybe you set an interval ometer and take many pictures and choose which parts of the Blur to include in it. Um, that way you you wouldn't have to. It looks like Hi, I s o noise in this file, which sometimes is okay, but here, I think, starts to become a little bit over power. Otherwise, there's a lot of other successful things about this foot, right? You can see when you could see star points around Commonwealth that that that's a sign that we've gone kind of too far. Yeah, I think we want to see the points around the really direct and bright light sources. All right. Next. I want to go there. Where is that little Jack Goodman? Let's ask Jack, Jack, if you could tell us where that is, we really appreciate it? Yeah. Looks like a wonderful place to visit. Yeah, this is magical, really. It's a beautiful photograph. There's it. Color is the most important feature of this photograph, and it's wonderful because there is the main subject of this photograph lacks color. Everything else around it is colorful. And you have this neutral area and the center that that really links it. And you put the moon right over that dip in the arch of the, which is strong, it makes a triangle. It makes a diamond double triangles there, which is really, really beautiful compositionally, um, and having Milky Way peek out of there and using the light pollution to your benefit was wonderful. The lighting on this side from camera side is very gentle and neutral. It looks like fill light to me. If I were to make one suggestion permit, I do like that that looks like a new moon sort of light, which is light that comes from nowhere because it really is. Lack of light is to maybe take a light source and scrape it down the sides of the stones and a couple of different directions to pull out a little bit more detail there and in play with that, I really have no objection to how you presented it to us at all. I think it's very lovely. But if you're gonna go back an experiment, maybe try pulling out some more detail in those stones, it's it would be worth experimenting with if you get to go back there anything that well, yeah, I think right. Pulling out the detail but also hiding some of the two I think it needs. Maybe the structure needs a little bit more contrast to it again. We everything is revealed to us in the structure. And again, I think there some some information should be hidden because again, it gives us a sense of where the light is or isn't. And again there's again beauty and shadows. Yeah, so that's sort of some of these. I want to see the lines and darkness and others. I want to see that detail of that texture of the brick. Thank you. I want to go there. So let's go. Let's go, Jack. Monument Valley. Beautiful. Right. And this is during you know, this is during twilight. So a wonderful time to do it. These are beautiful silhouettes of the you know of the monuments. And and I love those colors, right We have the sun and the sun has set, but we're getting that. So the reflecting light of the sun, even though it's below the horizon that that beautiful orange is from the sun light still kind of the light coming and hitting all their part of the particles in the horizon. So that's where we're getting that beautiful, beautiful orange. And then we can see that transition of that of that orange last licks of the golden hour transitioning to the blues and then the darkness above. So the colors in here are just so beautiful. And we see the stars, right? We could see the stars kind of the first sign of stars and their star point. So we can tell that this is a shorter exposure under 30 seconds, maybe 22nd exposure for it. Um, and I think this is this is something that would be very again where I talked about the power in the shadows. This is a perfect example of it. We don't need to see the information on the rock. Plus will be very difficult. You need like a five million flashlight to do it. Well, talk using a walkie talkies and a friend. But these these structures are also we have the mittens, right? So we have the gloves showing in there at an angle where those are very strong, strong silhouettes right there. I wonder, you know, I like that. Were there the stars in here, but really, to me, it's about the colors. All the the power of the of the picture is along this bottom part right here. Okay. So I wonder, uh, I think this would make also a more powerful panoramic if we were to maybe crop it down like here and look and look across these stars air great. And it's great to see it, but we also have them lower. So even though I love the transitions, we have ah lot of this dark transition here, So I wouldn't mind just either cropping somewhere here to here and seeing that because this is a wonderful This is this is a panoramic location. So to crop it that way, would you just further emphasize that and also draw s'more in to the beautiful colors and structures? I like your suggestion that I'm going to go on the opposite direct Okay, because that's the best thing about Jury ISn't exactly it's ideas thrown back on. I love the minimalism of this photograph a lot. The minimalism makes it very special because there are a lot of photographs to get busy with detail, right? There's some photographs that allows to take a breath and enjoy big open spaces, and this one succeeds of that. If you were a technical adjustment to this, if you were to pull ingredient down from the top to try and make a little bit more of those stars, pop that just and we did a little bit of that in one of our courses or two of them, at least in teaching how to process, like Milky Way stuff. Start points are included in that makes some of those stars pop out a little bit more, uh, with some clarity. Ah, that's one of the adjustments and maybe a little bit D haze that might that might bring out some more stars to balance the strong nests of the bottom part of that and create more of that separation of heaven and earth. Otherwise, again, beautiful. Very successful photograph. Thank you. Wish in my portrait. Uh, me. Hi. Thank you. That's beautiful. Let's see, I want to go there to all these beautiful places. It's It looks like a very special moment. I can't tell if this was a flash or if this was an existing light. I think that using a short lighting was was a good idea. Um, except that the late was below the rock and you end up not illuminating part of the leg there, which creates a little bit of a distracting shadow. It could be I'm kind of getting the feeling that this was a street lamp that was nearby because that instead of a staged light, so if that was the case, then you couldn't move the street lamp. You could block it off and use a flash. Um, I think she held still ish, and that's another ah, signal that it wasn't necessarily a flash. A flash could have made this a little bit more successful. And here's some more evidence that it was a street lamp because we have it was probably far away because it's pretty alone, even illumination from this and using the inverse square ally was probably about 40 feet away because everything is pretty much the same like that. Um, compositionally. It's great you didn't break the cardinal rule of making a portrait, which is putting our horizon that somebody's neck your head. It's down here the waste, which is a good complement. She's got a good triangle arm there. Good pose, great face, beautiful smile. And you can tell that it's at night. You've got some stars. I might put a little bit more work in the processing this area to pull up the stars just a little bit more, but I do like everything else that's going on here. She's a little bit towards the center of the frame, so I might look Teoh put her on one of the thirds a little bit more to make a stronger in A. Like I use rule of thirds, sometimes not all the time and Portrait's. It's very strong because you have a person in one of the quadrants, and then you can start to build part of the other story elsewhere. So if she were on that rock instead, you would see more of the story over here. Otherwise, technically, it's a great achievement for night portraiture. Good work. All right. This is from an audience member here. Whoa! The moon. And what we have is that the Olympics, where the mountains there it's create delicious. And this could be one of the most difficult shots to get. Is that is that I like to call it that. Create delicious moon where we can see it because obviously you've taken this again. Really? The time to take and to be in to see the craters of the moon Is that twilight time? We're still during twilight, So that's why we don't see any stars right here. But that's fine. The story is the move, right? And the moon and then the reflection, which always great to get a nice little lead in line up there and so that this is a very short exposure. As faras you know, night photography goes. This is a fraction of a second in order because, you know, the moon is so is so bright. This is our brightest light source. So, really, in order to successfully take things, we're talking about getting it at almost 1 25th or 250th of a second. You know, during that twilight time, and you really need to get it, You know, depend upon how long the twilight is, you know, just as it's coming along the horizon or, you know, I actually this is one of the highest ones I've seen. So this must have been maybe during the summer months or something like that, that the twilight was lasting a little bit longer and we can get it a little bit higher in the sky. Yes, actually, during the supermoon already had when it last summer, whenever it was excellent. Yeah, that is a supermoon Bravo. So I like the composition. So we have our you know, we have our foreground information here. Then we have this wonderful and full of rich detail information in that mid to Infinity point as well. So lots of information. Lots of lots of places for our I toe Look, the moon is a kind of it. Just as Matt said it is sort of in a It's not if we look at the rule of thirds, it's not in the middle, but not on a power point as well. So I would have experimented maybe a little bit more with that also, and we see it, You know what's important where that moon trail goes is also very important. So because I think and even though it's moving so we had to would would move to move quickly. This is definitely something interesting to look at. But, boy, if that reflection was on the boat with those people, right, that would have been like the the shop. And of course, they're moving. So that would have been a quick adjustment. Or you see them right? We have to not just look in the camera. We have to be aware of the surroundings. So if you see something happening, know that, okay? Obviously we don't want to get him here because that's interference. They're in the right position. But if we would have just done one more step to the left and that moonlight was shining on them when you only have one shot really to do, it may be too, because it is a quick exposure, but waiting And that sort of that exciting time, you know? You know, again, this is you know, we're waiting, waiting, waiting. We set it up, we got it. And then now Okay, click get those shots. But really, um, all in one shot, correct? Which is that's, you know, a really difficult thing to do. But you did it during the supermoon. We did it during the twilight. And I just love the mountains back there that to be able to see that softly, you know, through through that haze on and I love also the colors, you know, coming in here that wonderful, you know, purplish on blues. Those airplane so well, the colors and then that they're reflecting right on in here is well, I love I love that all of those colors. So anything else you like? OK, excellent. You're welcome. This is a really cool star trail. It's it's it looks to be. Well, I'm not positive about this. It could be that you composited because it's it looks to be quite a long exposure or stack ends. Still, the highlights which get pretty bright in the trees, aren't too blown out, meaning like alien blown out. I I love what those lights due to illuminate what's usually the darkest part of the photograph. The forest is the hardest thing to light up. Unless you have light sources that there. So what it does is it provides a balance in this composition and also provides that reflective opportunity on the lights. It's I it's it's really cool. Ah, you're pointing north northeast here. You could tell because Polaris is north and to the right disease so we can see the star trails get longer to write shorter on the left. But you can see there rotate around the North Star there. I think that was a a good decision to do that cause you've got short toe long to actually going the other way, which happens when you go towards the South. And I think people like Teoh to see the evidence of time passing That way I think I would have in a technical sense. Although I do like those highlights, I would try to control them just a little bit more anything like either go in there with the brush or yeah, I would probably use a brush and not a general control. If using light room and go in there and pull back the whites in the highlights a little bit and see if you can recapture some of that detail. Uh, that would that would help a little bit. You don't have to do it on the reflections. The reflections look kind of like how it like the forced to look, which is hard because the light reflecting off water always eat some of the light. Some refracts down into the water. Some bounces off, so you're the water is always gonna be darker than the lights that reflect on to it. It's one of the things you'll notice as you do more shooting. Otherwise, I think this is a really successful long Star trail. I wonder what the what the further reflections would have looked like. Kind of. I'm curious about that. So when we're setting up and looking at it, you know, this might be the first shot that we take because we see the North Star and we see that way see a dark sky that we can play with. But obviously there's a few stories going on here, and one of them that's not given a lot of just given a hint. But it's a very surreal hint of those reflections, and I won't mind, you know, seen if maybe those stars were reflecting and I wonder if even that is the picture. You know as well a little bit either A little bit war, the whole thing. I don't know. You know, that's I mean, just again. Keep You know, when we're taking these pictures, we want to keep on pushing, right? We don't. I mean, you'll know when I get when you when you're satisfied, you push the camera down and you say, I'm done right? That's wait. No, that's exactly right. Drop that. Drop the camera. But but oftentimes were like, Okay, this is where I'm starting. It looks good. I got my start trails, I got for reflections. But then really again, like we said before, look at that picture. And really, are you really jast? Are you super excited about it or you like That's a good shot. That's the shot. That's great. Can you make it better? Really? Can you push it, push it all along and sometimes I push it along? Is that what f or where are your eyes going to in that picture And a lot of the our eyes are going to the you know, it's brighter down here, but I wonder also what's down there. I'm curious about that. So the successful photograph can create curiosity. Exactly. Yes, definitely. Definitely not. Also revealed. Right. All right, well, right now I'm gonna talk about this night. Portraiture. Leadoff. All right, cool. So, um, Carousel really cool. I like the composition. I like the lines going on here. I like that. It's a vertical. We've seen a lot of horizontal shots, so I like that it's vertical and all the lines are going vertical. So that was a very good decision to do that. I like the colors that are going on. We have the red and the blue. We've got these warm colors here, and we could tell that this is a fairly modern horse, not an old old horse, but And I like her. Look, the look in her shape. What she's doing, you know, in the images also, um, really, really interesting and kind of creates our I to kind of move around and look around. That shot one thing. I I wish you know, that didn't happen in this, as I wish that she didn't get her wrist cut in half. You know, I really wish instead of putting the hand here, there's no I mean, yes, it's a horse, one of at it. But I think it be more important if she put her hand there. And it wasn't then we don't have a line going through that. You know I want because I want to see that line of her, Whether her hands Here it's again, another line that kind of goes up. I don't mind this one, you know, But I want to have sort of again that sense of depth, that we have something at the beginning going throughout the image, I think that will create even more even more continuous lines that will kind of draw us through there. I love this over here, too. And I love the short aperture, you know, small, the wide aperture, I should say so. Shallow depth of field. And this is sharp right here. But we have information, you know, in the background. That kind of gently leads us around. Um, you know another thing again. This is a very sharp shot. I wonder if you Leela also experimented with with doing some time bending and this is well, I would assume this is this carousel is moving as well, but I don't see I mean This is the moment the a little bit of movement that I might see around just just blurred out. But it would be cool to kind of see a little movement in this as well. So either, you know, bouncing Flash or again using that Hirai s O. Because she is, well, wit on, I believe it's just the lights from the carousel. I don't think this is any sort of flash that's being brought into the scene, but it'll be cool to see that's a sense of movement in this image as well. I think this photographer did bring their own light source. Yeah, I it feels like it because it looks pretty intentional from the shadow that okay, it looks like that the one thing I would want to do It's just if another light were available would be the to bring out a light to kiss the edge here to make her pop out from the background. Just a Titch Moore is then, then this stuff where it gets soft. The difference to in soft and sharp would pull out even more end, and then this would Yeah, it's it's hard to get a light source in here on the right thing because of this huge speculate highlight right across here. That's it's a challenging shot, but you took it and it's better than not taking it. That sounds like a left handed compliment. It's not. I think this is This is great. You could bring it. Saw? Yeah, you could. You could get in trouble and bring us our Yeah, and then pay the operator Teoh to spin it one more time. Like Gibbs said, to put a little time bending into this, it would be great to see the background moving on this. Uh, although this is this is strong and you're strong. Yeah. Oh, I have to do the next one area go. There's there's something powerful in late existing for its own safe, right? Because they I guess that the roots of photography being, you know, painting with light, writing with light, right, photographing. So a being able to do this and this I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that this is full moon moonlight. A long exposure you can see in the upper right hand corner. That's probably about a minute or two of stars pulling through there, which is about the time it takes to build one of these orbs. You've had some experience of these words I have. How do you do these orbs? You take a a light source. It could have one or multiple allergies. It's It's easier with one, Uh, and basically it's a battery powered source with lights on a string and at the end to have a bundle of lights or one light. And I'll stand at the demonstrable, please. Yeah, you spend the lights and you rotate around your wrist and every that full globe. And then when you're between the camera and this, you want to basically start from here and go around all the way, rotating around your wrist. Just keep looking at your wrist the whole time until you come around the computer and then stopped like that, and that will create a full or because the late is spinning around in a circle like this. And then you just keep turning that circle. That makes him like, Why can't we see the person? Well, you can't see the person because number one you should be wearing dark clothes. Ninja Ninja ninja, full black face paint. If you can just, like, go dark. You know, pull your hood over, lets people wear hoodies just for that, and you keep moving. So even though there's full moonlight on you, if Long's your body keeps moving and you're not wearing reflective items of clothing, you can make an orb like this. So no khakis, no khakis, no cool high tops. You know, uh, but this this is successful. It's hard to get a perfect orb. And that that technique that I showed you, I guess they people that teach this you know what a plumb Bob is in carpentry. It's basically ah, large brass, Uh, like arrow on a string. If you have one of those, just like you can put like some nuts and bolts on a string and hang him like you can put that out here in practice, you know, doing the swinging part, hanging on your wrist and then just making sure that always hits the same spot on the ground and walking around because you want it. If you put it on, the wrist is still in the wrong place. It kind of has to be on the hand, but you're shaking the hand. The point is imagining a straight line going down and that rotating your wrist around that that will help you do. This ends the technique part of this. This is not a perfect orb. It looks like the wrists moved a little bit in an arc going around during this because you'd see all of those circles match up in the same exact place on the top of the bottom. If your wrists dating exactly the same place, it's still fun, right? If the color choice was perfect because you have all this day late looking stuff at first you wanted to believe it's a daylight shot because that's that's a sunlight angle right, which the moon is just some light bounced off the moon, right? Uh, and then you see the stars and then you see the orb, and that's where the curiosity of like, Oh, this is night photography comes cross. And that's the thing I like seeing going on in a photography eyes that ah, great. And that's a good, good moment. Anything that well, I like that they really chose the spot nicely. It's in the shadow. So what I really like about this image is not obviously the or but the light from the orb on the ground. And if this person would have done it back here, that would have been burnt out the moonlight. Right? So just having this nice little liquor of red light their eyes a nice further plus in my book. This is why I love doing critiques with the way should do this more often. Live. All right, fund at the fair. I love these kind of shots. This is like, really when we can get out there. There's so many affairs during the summer, I've never seen one quite like this. This is not my zipper. You know, this is a really cool and I love how it's bending and twisting throughout. Don't eat anything before you go on this one. And this is from DeMartini. So great job and great colors. Look at that. You know, the red, white and blue or white, red, white, blue that's going on here. So, uh, the key with this one, which I think it was done quite successfully, is that we're way want to do this before it gets too dark. We really want to go out. When were at the fairs and we're wanting to bend time with all these beautiful lights. Obviously, we have to wait for them to turn it on and for it to get dark enough. But this is another good place to bring that neutral density filter you want. This is where we can kind of bend time a little bit, you know, during that twilight. And we're going to move quickly and efficiently during that twilight time because once it gets dark and it becomes that night, all this would be black. And that's a lot of negative space. So that's what we kind of really want to avoid. So much with that. Is that a lot of just dark, negative, dark, negative space? This is an overcast night, which, you know, obviously, I would rather have this be a blue, You know, that sort of that blew our sort of light in it. But I like that this overcast. We're still seeing the detail in the clouds. That's nice to see. To see, I would possibly maybe come down maybe a little bit again, because again, that is, this is a bit of head room. We just need enough head room for us. to get that movement, and I kind of come in and here and what I'm also seeing this was instead of using a neutral density filter, this person used a very small aperture f 16 of 22 to push that time along. And I'm seeing that because I see how dirty their censorious boom boom boom, all those little flecks those look like little pieces of dust on our sensor. Those air highlighted. You know, when we when we close down our aperture, we're getting depth of field in front of the lens. But we're also getting depth of field behind the lens. So if you haven't, you clean your sensor recently. You know, you know, be careful when you stop down and that's where again these neutral density filters we can. Instead of shooting and forcing ourselves to shoot at F 16 F 22 we can shoot at maybe 5.68 where we won't have as much depth on the other side. But we can still get the proper amount of time play here. But besides that, I mean, this has really filled right. The lower half is filled so nicely, I mean, I do want. Always want a little breathing room on each side, and that's sort of the least amount of breathing room I want in an image. But I can see it. That line is not cut off there. And we that we still see sort of the people there in there, you know, we could go maybe a little bit more down on that, you know? But I don't know, really. The story is this right here. And these are things that we experiment with time a lot, too. So whether this is a five second to second, you know, usually these exposures air anywhere from two seconds to 15 seconds. When we go longer than that, we worry about these being blown out. So this is a little hot here. I like this yellow there, but that is a little hot. I don't need to see sort of the light and how, how much? How many lumens it is. But it is a little hot there, so we want to kind of be a little. That's where we need to kind of pay attention to with these with these images. But this is a great, great capture. I'll have one thing to that? Yep. I don't know if it's the resolution at which these were I added, requested or uploaded, but it looks like there's a little bit of high eso noise reduction a little bit too much applied to this. It just looks a little bit it processed in in the brain areas here. So I don't know if that's an artifact of the resolution of the resolution or not. But just be careful of that. When you're processing these things do not push too far. Otherwise, it's fun. This looks like a local photograph. Guys look like a local photograph. Erin, thank you for submitting on you. It looks like you're trying to, uh, capture a couple of the basics of night photography. One. Getting good, simple exposure. That's great. One is getting some of the car trails in there to, uh, and it's good you've got great highlight controlling here. The It's always hard when there's neon on the scene to not have a blowout. We talked about that earlier. Um, that's good that you you made sure that that didn't disappear because it keeps the color. Once it gets too bright, you lose all of the hue the color to it. Uh uh, And it looks like the there are car trails here, but the sacrifice was they weren't bright enough. So perhaps a different point of view where your pointed mawr into the headlights sidelights? Yeah. Instead of the sidelights of the car, you would pick up more of that light in your lens and have that show up even more. Um, having those those car let's go straight across is pretty cool, cause there's a shadow, too, which kind of makes me think about depth that makes layers here. But it also creates this dead spot in the middle where we have to look in our eyes, get sort of locked in and the composition there. So I think if one of gave service ideas is to get down low. I think if you got about six inches off the ground or eight inches off the ground, you could find something cool and dynamic. They might get closer to the signs at that point, but you could play with that either that or go higher because right or change the composition a little bit, because I'm having trouble finding interesting things to look at in the bottom part of the frame. Uh, while there's so much fun stuff happening up on top, I do like the cables up there, but taking over that negative space? Yes, up there? Yeah. Yeah. I think that that that worked out, but playing a little bit with camera position and perhaps maybe cropping crop out maybe, like, 20% of the bottom. Try that. And then there's things will be more on thirds in there. Anything that I think you hit it. Great move a twirl of light. And I like this. We got multi, multi light segment. Cool. Um, and it's interesting we talked about We see the person. This is not a ninja way. See a foot there. Then we see some little looks like a white hoody shape right there. But I love I love the colors here and job. So I love what this looks like. A multi, you know, thing that was twirled around in a little park and a nice little dark area of the park that we're that we're finding. So I love that the shape we could experiment. Of course This I don't know if this was one of the early tries or the middle tries where obviously, right here, we're seeing a little overlay and this is the fun part right here when we can see each and every one of those colors and this is hard. I'm not. This is easy. And Nicole, Great job. We're kind of getting out there and really out of his own and experimenting with that. But again, kind of the lessons that Matt was saying about that arm angle. And this is really just a few twirls. And I wonder, you know, so many of these ladies have different switches, so I wonder what it would look like sometimes two, if we just turn it on and it we just do one movement, turn it off and that takes a lot of experimentation. You know, there's a beauty and a twirl in a continuous twirl, but then with that, we want to fill up all the area on go around and those are the Globes. But I don't Globe isn't always the answer, and the globes have been done. So why don't we play with Mawr? Shapes more unique shape so we can kind of do up and down like this or really create these sort of things, and these are wonderful things to buddy with. I don't know if you had a buddy with or not, but these are also times if you have a you know, a friend who is an artist who really is an artist. Maybe give them the lights to experiment, cause that's in pretty fun stuff. And then you can really be the director behind the camera. That's a great you know, that that's always, you know, because I know I may throw me in their horrible, absolutely horrible. You know, I go like, chaotic and like, 0.2 seconds, you know. But I really liked in our episode where we gave you the Picasso challenge on and you really you know, Matt does cut paper art as well. So again, bringing those are friends that are maybe, you know, cartoonist drawers, stuff like that boy that's going to open up a whole new avenue of different things on unique things that could be written temporarily with light but captured forever, you know, with our cameras. So what's also look, so we have some beautiful reflections going on here, So this is interesting. So we do have sort of, You know, if we look at composition wise, this is sort of in the power point of that rule of thirds. But the problem is, I think this information kind of gets lost a little bit, especially over here in this dark tree. I would maybe think about I like these trees over here, and they're also reflecting, so I might also consider making it a little bit stronger. I may be cropping in this way as well. Looks like we see maybe a couple stars over there, but this looks like a super fun, experimental walk in the park. So thank you for submitting and keep on experimenting with that. Whoa. Where is that? I'm gonna I'm gonna take it again. Go there. I think Brad did this in Colorado. This kind of looks like there's all those old minds and and beautiful water and stuff. Just just uneducated. Guess. Okay, I I think starting with composition this really strong. It has s curves have a power, right? So you haven't s curve going through here, and then you have a place for the eye to stop once it hits the rocks at the bottom of the S curve straight up boom. It's like a portrait subject. That house slash shack is now the subject of the portrait. And then you know it. And it looks like it's got a hair light, which is the moon, right? So the shacks got a hair light, and and there is some primary illumination for the shack. One adjustment I'd suggest for this is this flashlight. Everything else is daylight, right? Uh, this is a beautiful like the white balance for this. Everything looks neutral, right? Slightly cool, but mostly neutral, right? It looks a little green to me the way it's displayed here. Maybe on your screen it's a little bit different, but I have to go with what I have in front of me. Some correction to that late to choose a more neutral source, or even a slightly warmer because the green so two sets mouth a tiny bit, too. Using those color temperature gels we spoke of earlier. If you throw like a light CTO on a white, a delayed balance flashlight than then that that would just get a little bit warmer. And our eyes are drawn to not only brighter things in the scene but warmer things. So when I see that green, I'm like, I feel like there's there's something If if you don't have these tools articulate you be like what's missing? Like I really love this photo both. What's missing? If it was a little bit warmer, which you might be able to adjust post processing by using a brush and color temperature, move the tent towards the been gentle a little bit and brush over that. Make it try and pull it back a little bit towards neutral and or warm, and that will pop out. Um, the reason I say that is these rocks in front of us have these beautiful angled reflections on them from the moon. Right, So you wanna have a light that can compete with that on your main subjects. Otherwise, they the choice of lighting was good. I think that you did a great job for not being able to hop across, especially for scrambling along rock. Just give you a ride. Some credit here? Yeah, yeah, I Yeah, um I'm OK with the trees in the corner because they're holding that moon in place. I actually like seeing the moon. Normally, it's kind of weird to have just something hanging in the corner and a composition. Uh, but here it works because you have solid wall of trees the whole way, and then they sort of push the I back in towards because they curve. So that's that's a keeper. I'd like to just again mention the moon in this image. We talked about the create delicious moon. That's one way we can interpret the moon. I like this interpretation. This is the way that I usually if I bring the moon into the scene, is I'll turn it into that looks like a just a giant star, right? And then we can do that by again. This is probably a moderate aperture by looking at the sort of the star points coming out of the moon. So this is probably an f eight, you know, maybe enough 11. But, uh and this is a short exposure, you know, as faras short, long exposures go, you know, way have star point. So this is either 20 or 30 seconds long, which is perfect amount for that water to We don't want that water that we have details in the milky nous. There were not having that kind of, you know, just turned white, You know, they're still details is super important, but again, a great way. Most of us avoid the moon once it's sort of passed that Cray delicious time. But I think it's really powerful to add that light source. And that's where we, you know, we get eyes being drawn to the brightest part of the scene. So we look up to the moon, were kind of drawn along the river, and then we go up the buildings. What a lot of wandering. A lot of great wandering and great reveals here in this image. So great job, Red Steve in the outhouse. All right. Yeah. This could be the best out. How shot we've ever seen here, however, closed the door. Next. You know, what do we do? You know? Awesome, Right. So glad we're not operating in smell O vision. No, this is This is really a fantastic capture and taking sort of a mundane subject and making it powerful. Right? So we've got Milky Way. We've got some light painting going on. We can see that Steve here did a good job of scraping the foreground instead of lighting. You know, when we light the ground, don't light it again from five feet, 2 to 6 feet, two above, You know, go down there and put that flashlight to that level. And that way we're gonna create light. But we're also creating shadows behind those rocks. So that's a really cool and smart way to do it. Perfect example. What I've been talking about, Shadow. We've got Shadow and we've got, like, painting here. It makes it interesting. Do we need to see every side of this outhouse? No, but we have a nice detail in the door. The mystery of what's inside, you know, and also these this information. We don't need to see these other trees. We see it a strong silhouette here. I don't know if this is the next outhouse there. That shape is if anything, that is maybe the slightly like, distracting shape that I find in it. Because what is it? You know, it's in another outhouse. I kind of like that. That lonely out house in the middle of the woods sort of feel to it. So a slight, you know, the feedback, I would say is maybe turns one angle because I don't think we want to crop. I mean, we could try cropping this out, but we're cropping out a lot of information there. So again, those those movements and those choices that we make in the field, you know? Yes, this is coming right over, you know, the outhouse. And I like that. But maybe again, it was just Mother, May I take one medium step to the left and try to just get that, you know, as the only sort of man made structure you know in the sea? Um, the Milky Way looks looks pretty well processed. We have that galactic core right out there and very visible and very cloudy. We're seeing a lot of green in this image on I don't know if that is due to the light pollution or that color temperature, usually a Milky Way. The preferred Milky Way white balance is 4800 if we're just looking at the Kelvin value of it. But often times again, it's cooked to your taste on. And I think this is just a touch too green. I wouldn't mind going a little bit more to the warmer browns yellows than that green, But again back depend upon what sort of light pollution were battling. Anyways, that might be a challenge. But, you know, we have sharp stars. What good placement here. And, uh, I don't know if I'd love to visit this place. You know, uh, but, uh, thank you for sharing, Steve, if I was to Seacrest under the stars. Yes, yes, yes. It's better than a leaf. Yes. Uh hmm. This is a very gentle moment. Stand up and enjoy the whole thing. A strong composition with the motif, the repeating shapes. It leads the eye towards the rest of the scene. Ah, just after just dusk is going away or just after sunset. A little bit of stars and movement in there. Many different light source colors here. Most of them look like tungsten from the houses, which was good to keep a daylight. So you could still see the natural son, uh, colors from there. And you could tell that that's the warm glow from homes. If it was any different color than it would look wrong, it would. It wouldn't feel right, because we expect home light to be warm light. Like if that was neutral. You wouldn't feel the same about this photo, right? So if we said at the Tungsten, you wouldn't feel that way. So that was a good choice. Uh, the I guess in this case I want I want the composition to be a little bit cropped in. Like I would I would suggest probably coming into about here because that this little up right here on the edge, it just those those make me want to think about Maura. Probably crop it off somewhere around this junction. Boxer. Ah, whatever that is over there. And then you would have sort of a balance between this and that or just to the left of that. But that one climbing piece out of the edge has sort of drawn me out without a way to come back into the image. Um, a good choice of focus to, I think right after the last house, the focus starts to get a little bit softer and that that could just be heat, haze or duster water in the air to. But it's a nice, gentle, soft image that's it's soft and contemplative. Good work. And this is an audience member who were all right. Hey, you think you'd like to add that we're tryingto portray? Yes. I was actually trying to get more stars, but as you can see there, I don't know if it wasn't night without a lot of stars. Uh, yeah, that my goal was to get like us. They re sky and like the houses. But I don't know if it waas because how long after dark was it was like at 11. So yeah, it's in LA push Washington One of the cyber during the summer, urban in during the summer The summer says 11. So as well after dark, it seems like a lot of light on the horizon for so late in the evening Was there a moon simply source in the sky or Well, I The moon is like on the right. Yeah, way have mood like moonlight eating the stars. That's what we have, You know, the death star familiar with things This is the movie star, you know, so right. And that's always you know, when we choose our compositions at night, Sometimes the best compositions are going to be what we want to do. So we have to either look to something else or or Or this now is not going to be about a lot of stars because we have the moonlight eating up this much light or creating this much light, right? So I bet you, if you would have maybe looked the other way. I don't know if there was more buildings this way, but it could have been darker that way, you know, Or again, maybe coming in closer to behind here because you could see we're starting to see the stars here, right? So if we could angled mawr that way, you know, and end up That's why I always like to shoot. I like like 80% of my network is vertical. I'm going up great for book covers. Let me just say that I'm not thinking about the double spread, but again, as we can go up generally, you know, it will get darker, the higher we go. So in the United States, there's very few darks guys, unless we get some of those national looks, even some of those national parks have a lot of light pollution in them. But if we can go further or again, if this was on a you know That's what we choose when we scouted locations and you might not have obviously had this choices was a long planned vacation weekend. But I always look the first thing when I know I'm going to go somewhere. I'm like, Okay, what's the moon phase? You know, it might have been my my plane with the moon face my playing with a full moon half moon, No moon, you know, because that will be determined what kind of night I'm gonna have. And that way I can get into that that moon said, or that mindset right for it. Okay, so you know, it's funny when I first started and I think when will the West first are We were going out every full moon because that was sort of the digital technology or the film technology that we're using. That was the easiest we'll get, were given a lot of light. So there was a good time to write, really, You know, work during those circumstances, but now, with digital cameras, the way they are and we can safely operate at 326, now weaken, Throw whatever not you want at me, you know, and I'll and I'll be prepared because we have that proper gear and I often differ, too. I like nights would have a little bit in one light, but then the moon sets or the moon comes up late because that gives me a variety of a night to choose from instead of just. I just went out to Dry Tortugas and was during the full moon, and I kind of got bored after a couple hours. I hate to say that, you know, but I was like, Wow, it just looks like I'm here during the day because there's so much moonlight and I was really looking for more shadows wax and went inside. I did less shooting outside, and I went inside the building and I would start starting toe like paint and do work with stuff in the shadows. So thank you so much. You. I'll just add one thing if if you have the opportunity to be in the same place, tried during 1/2 moon and then tried during a new moon, you'll get way more stars during a new moon and do it like start a dusk. If this is 11 then you'll be able to get a little bit of the blend of that. This stuff in the background and some color in the sky. So right as twilight is ending would probably be the perfect time for you to get the shot that you're envisioning here. Okay, I'll try. Thank you. You're welcome. Ah, this meeting was issue. I forgot where we all take. It's I love sand and surf. Water is one of my favorite things to shoot at night. Thank you, Dan, for submitting this. I You have a good night here because the surf out there shows the near horizon or the horizon on, and you've got clouds that look like the shrub that you chose to put on the other side. So you've got a great compositional motif going on here with different things. Vertical? Yeah, it's vertical. I like it. C I A and the stars were coming out really well. Um, the the natural lighting on the sand. I'm going to guess you could see what a low angle of late does because I'm gonna guess that's that's a light that's probably 40 to 100 feet away. So it ends up being a point. Lead, light source that far away. It's scraping across the top of the sand, creating all that detail when you have a foreground in front of you. Remember the shot, because when you want to see more about that, what's happening in front of the camera? Sometimes not all of the time. But when you have an interesting foreground, helped pick it out with that low angle light, great job shadows and highlight that stuff. That's what makes it interesting. Shadows and highlight. I really I think you did a great job on a technical note. I think it's a little under exposed. Um, it looks like there's a little bit of noise in the shadows in There's not enough detail in the shadows. So I would I would choose to move away from the star points here and go to a longer exposure. Double it or quadruple it like two stops. Four stops Mawr just to pick up detail in the shadows there because I want to see more of that coastline along the left edge. I want to see a little bit more of the bushes on. I don't care if the clouds lose a little. A little bit of the detail because if you go from 30 seconds to a minute, they're not gonna lose all of that detail. Although it's nice to see that sort of detail at night. If they're slow moving, clouds go for even longer, so they don't become long blurs. I do. I'm a big fan of longer, longer exposures here. So I think you would pick up a ton more stars by doing that and gets more detail in shadows. Uh, in the only compositional objection that I have here is the umbrellas sticking it on the right hand side. I would crop those out there a little bit distracting to me that if you don't see enough of them for them to be part of the story, so they end up distracting me. Ah, but everything else is great cause you've got all you've got. You've got these half circles everywhere. You've got 1/2 circle on the left half circles in the sky, half circle on the right, and then that nice horizontal line on the third in the middle, with the force perspective coming towards you. So there's a lot of strong compositional choices here. Uh, anything you'd like to add. I like the darkness actually in this in this image. So here's the you know, but the caveat that, you know, people can look at it and see different things, But I don't. I am a little 95% of the work. We've seen a star point so far, right? So I think we all do need to start experimenting with more star trails out there, you know? But I like this and I like this because I like the shape of the clouds and clouds will be hard to battle when we're doing start, rest our trail. So that's always if we have cloudy or a lot of clouds moving through, then it's gonna be tricky to stack those stars. But I mean, it's night. It's supposed to be dark, and I love you know what I really like is, you know, the the Waves. You know, the white lane, the white lines of the waves bursting. That's a real nice like that kind of brings us in because this does get dark over here. We can see this little bit of the shape, and I like the shapes and the pathway. It's all about the pathway you know, so that. And I love those shadows in there that are kind of shadows and lights that are leading us through the scene. But I think this is a well done, Dan, and right just again. And this is so hard to see through our viewfinders. But right, what you said about those little umbrellas, that's like, you know, they're just creeping in just enough. We need we need to either see it or not. While we've got a magnificent Milky way shot from a milk. This is, uh, yeah, exactly. Um, what we call those bangers? Bangers? Yeah, that's a banker. I kind of want to go there. Yeah, we share with this location. Please share. Please email us all the location. So this is cool. So we have such a vibrant milky way here that we can tell that this is during there's no moon out or very little like a crescent of the moon. Yet there's a lot of detail in this, you know, wonderful landscape that we have really powerful landscape in front of us here. So I'm wondering, mil, if this was we have our shot. Kind of like what? Matt was just actually discussing. We take that shot. Maybe during that twilight time, because there's two ways we could do this. This will turn to silhouette often times, but there's two ways to avoid that is that we can do take one base shot while they're still a little bit of light. So during those twilight's so we have that one exposure and then we take without moving. The tripod is very important. You know, patients and night photography go hand in hand, and sometimes you would need after you take that shot during twilight, you're probably gonna need to wait another 30 minutes to an hour, sometimes now, and have for two hours until the stars come out just perfect for this. So that requires patience. That's why oftentimes Matt and I will maybe bring two rigs with us so that we can kind of let that one either cook or sit. And then we set a timer to know back, you know, to come back to that one, and then we could stay productive in the field by choosing another location. So I wonder if this was, you know, again, a blend of this exposure and that one, um now and also, you know, I like the Milky Way. I like how it's kind of coming in from here. And this is during, you know, probably a May or June month, or maybe July a little bit, too, because that black two courses is not at the horizon. It's more into the middle of a little bit, 30 degrees degrees above the horizon, which it's really nice to see that that's that sort of, you know, this exit is part of the Milky Way. Is the Galactic court right? So we want to see that, That's why and that's really in the Northern Hemisphere. It's up from May until about September, October, Southern Hemisphere. You guys are lucky you get it all year round, so But as with the earth rotates in the Milky Way is going to move along. So I wonder also, um, I like it there, but I wonder what it would like if it was going. If it was during an arc, maybe the ark would be insane. So right here. So again we can use the tools that Chris Nicholson was talking about in a scouting class and using like like a photo pills would be a great place. If you have this location tagged, you can find out exactly when that Milky Way is gonna arc over this. Because I think that would be really, really a powerful shot. And, you know, we go to a lot of the same locations because oftentimes when we go there, it's a scouting make not be all the ideal times to go, But it is still I'm not disappointed if I came home with this shot. I am definitely not disappointed, but I wonder what it would look like. It was Archy, or also coming straight out of this of the length of these pinnacles and stuff. The Milky Way does look a little bit over processed where I am, you know, not so much on our other screen, but on this screen. I'm seeing a little too much either clarity or sharpening on it. So on oftentimes, a trick with us that we like to do is really work on this part of it and let these stars sort of not be processed at the same sort of intensity as the Milky Way. That way we're really paying homage to the Milky Way, right? But we're letting the other stars just do their thing as well on not making it kind of now with them all being that the same brightness. We're looking at everything in the sky instead of, you know, really focusing on that Milky way. So but really, Mel, let's go there. Let's plan a date way we could switch over to the laptop way have one of the things that we found useful in our own workshops, eyes that when were doing direct critique with our workshop attendees is we'll do some live edits on their photographs. So we have some surprises here. We haven't seen any of these photographs ahead of time. By the way, I we have the ability to apply some adjustments to already processed images. So if you see something that doesn't look right, it's because we're not working with raw files were working with J pegs, but we can show before and after of some of the suggestions that we're making here. So, uh, all right, First up, we don't have names for these, So if if one of you in the audience has one of these images, please speak up. I think are these audience images anyways. Is this anyone's inventor know we get Scott. Okay, great. We'll find that we have the world's images. Right, so way. Good. Let's make it big. Cool. Well, I love black. And like, I love the use of reflection. Somebody was asking earlier about shooting during the wet times. This is a perfect example. Uh, you can see the benefits. You can't zoom in because of the same size. OK, all of this reflection is because of witness. So shooting when it's raining this look like those heavy pregnant clouds Just like I'm going toe drop water all day. I like that. It creates atmosphere and mood to s. So I think that having a little bit of color and the skies here from the, uh, plates from the city helped hit some of these clouds and create a little bit enough texture to show not just late gray right, And it ended up making a nice frame for the public market sign. There is beautiful. It's it's a creative risk to put a straight up in down line close to the middle of the frame like that. It really is, uh, but I think it paid off this time because of the reflective symmetry that's going on here. And it's not perfect symmetry like there's this little bit of area of of asymmetry in the middle that gives it some really interesting. Uh, you've got that shadow area that plays into this. But then you have symmetry outside of those edges where that that risk of putting it right in the middle of the up and down vertical, which usually by sex a photo and turns people off. It didn't happen this time, so it was a good choice. I don't have any edits to make things. This is We're not showing our edits here. Yeah, that window adding that window reflection That was a genius move. Really? That's that. That's what really separates. You know this shot. You know, if I stand right there without any, of course. But this shot, which is pretty good And the black, my interpretation is great, but but adding that other reflection Beautiful. So great job. All right. I want to go there. This is a just a dull mentor. Kramlich. Forget. Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't know. It's a doorway doing when I was a doorway to another place that's that's what we have. And wow, these colors never seen these colors like this before. Is this Australia that? Does it look like this in Australia? I have not been. Have not been so this. I don't know. You know if it's coming from a white balance choice, But look at that. You know, this is a very long exposure. This is probably at least a two hour exposure. And whether it's stacked, what most likely was stacked or whether it was a continuous shot and we could see So here is our our north star right here. So it's not Australia years on. And that boy, when you can make the North Star make a squiggle that's a long exposure. Usually the North Star for about an hour to an hour and 1/ is going to be really that star point. But here we've got it as a parentheses. So, boy, I'm thinking this is at least four hours, you know, again that 2 to 4 hours sort of thing. So what might happen? Because I'll tell you something. I'm I like. I like the you know, this is fascinating colors, but these aren't complementary colors. These are very colors that are close to each other on that wheel, that yellow and orange. So they're kind of blending all in to each other. And I wonder, you know what would happen? I guess. Well, we can experiment. I guess this is the whole part of it. Here is if we kind of take this down. I like the composition. I love the placement of of our our our doorway right here. And then, you know, I mean, obviously, if we want to take these down, that involves a chainsaw, but we don't need that here. But let's play with sort of the colors that are going on This this seems to be a little bit more calming to me than that. I love that warm warmth over here that the red I like that like a red over here. But I think we had just an overriding red and red. You know, we can kind of even push it further that way and that kind of experiment, you know, with it, like a little bit green, but not in Aurora Green there. So we can kind of play with this and I find this to be a little bit more neutral and a little bit more easy for us to look at everything super sharp and hear. So good job on focusing, because this is a dark seen as well and we've got super sharp stars. And we've got a good placement again. We can kind of see their Here's the rule of thirds that we've been talking about here. So again, this structure perfectly placed in that power point. We got a power point there. We've got a power point there. You know, this is the North Stars close enough to the is right on that line. Right on that line. So really, really find full and great, you know, job on really looking in that viewfinder and taking your time toe fill that frame. The intent is obvious. So every curiosity okay, doesn't want to see what happens. I'm applying De hes right now ends. Uh, if we put it at zero, some of that softness of the atmospheric dust, the dust, it's in their debate. Just putting a little bit on it gets even clearer. Um, can I? Well, that was the before at it. And this is after we've applied a little bit So it just makes it makes think the stars, which obviously are very important part of this photo come out a little bit more. Um, you could see, right we go. We can see the before and after their you drive was there. We have a wine y there. Yeah. So this is our take on it. Which do you prefer? Do you like the red and yellows? Do you like the blues and greens, you know? Well, played straight. Very strong image. Very, very excellent. Back out. This I don't like that. Who? Just like that. That looks like a filter at classic Skyline Photo Classic. I love what happens when you choose to leave the shutter open for longer than 30 seconds. I think that this is somewhere around 30 seconds in a minute because I can still see detail in the water. It might even be less than 30 seconds. And you could see that most prominently down here. Um, when you see those, those little sparkles. That means that the water didn't have enough time with late hitting it to get softer and softer. This is just a personal preference. I would have I would have gone for even longer to make all of this get even smoother. By no means does that mean this is a failure is an image which is a success is an image, but I really love seeing soft, soft, soft water. Uh, and if you even went to two minutes, you start to see a remarkable difference. If you could. Possibly, it's hard in cities to do this, get upto like 10 or minutes. You would see a completely different photograph in that the bottom of this would turn into a dream. It would be turned into soft velvet, and the top of this would be sharp. So maybe that's a good opportunity, since there's a perfect horizon there to even split the photograph. Make two different exposures, one that's perfect for the highlights on all the cityscape and then one of them that turned into the soft, dreamy bottom. Um, but this is this is a assailable image if you wanted. If you wanted to go out and sell this to people who like seeing a photograph of a city on the wall. This is a perfect example of what a successful images, and this was definitely done during, like, the last licks of twilight. You know, um, maybe, you know, obviously heading from Nautical Teoh Astronomical twilight Because it is. We don't see the richness and the blue, but it works. It works in this shot I would like to just see again. Let's take a look at the you know where the power points are on this image. Because I also think again we could possibly hope not like that was done to original. Let's do custom and we can kind of unlock it and maybe just bring it down just a smidge, because again, there's nothing, Not much information. I want to give it head room, you know? But there's also that as well. They just brings us in a little tighter, you know, to to the the reflections to the buildings like those cities. When we do cities like this, they lend themselves to being panoramic. So, you know, not only shoot it like this, but maybe shoot a couple images so we could have a nice long panoramic of that city. You know, I think that makes it even more sellable, you know, image. Yeah, the river I step in. It's not the river. I'm standing cool. It created curiosity. We wanted to Really? Well, I know this was taken at 10 minutes of 10 and a but this this is a great image. I like this image. It actually is an example of several of the things that we were talking about already. The levels. This is a bus going by train, but we have levels of lights here which, you know, if we just had this, that would have been is interesting if we had all this. Um, we have a lot of negative space in here. That is, I guess my only you know, critique for that is that there is a lot of blackness up here. So this is a great shot. If you live near there or if you are going back to this location, I might try that again during the twilight time where we can kind of get a little bit more detail up there in the sky because it's hard. I mean, we can crop down a little bit, but there's still a lot of blackness in the shot. I also think a little bit, you know, again, I like this choice. We talked about getting vantage point above, you know, or that sort of street value, which again we're not looking at it from the side is sort of, you know, it is moving away from us. I thought we could see the shape of that over there, but it is moving away from us, so I might, you know, move. Maybe a step closer. Maybe. You know, obviously be careful with this. We're not asking. You get in the middle of the street, though. It's cool to get the middle street, but yeah, I like this. And I don't think I mean, I could do a couple of crops here, but I think you know, really with this, it's it's coming back there a little bit at a better time. Free. So OK, next Cool. Wow, Trains. I can hear it. I'm having a stand by me. Moment. Thistle is this has all sorts of time bending and beauty going on in it. Uh, it tells this story because there's the even. The story is written out for you and the signs and there Ah, I think the there's the exposures. It's unfortunate it's experiment like there's not a lot to edit on this one either. I mean, on screen here, I wouldn't change a thing Like the exposure on the signs is great. The exposure on the highlights is great. Stars exposed. Very well, uh, ends I even see over here. I see the train light hit this power line coming this way to and you could see the fogger the smoke down there. There's so many interesting things going on in this photograph. This is this is ah, Bangor. Well, I wouldn't I mean, I think my, um the one thing is that train, like, coming right at us. That's a hard thing. And that's our eyes are being drawn right to that. And I really love this light over here. I think that's a little bit too bright and again, unfortunately, um, Steve, if we try to, um, remove some of this with a brush and we go in here with and get rid of a temperature, we go to maybe exposure and let's say okay, defaults the 1.5. If we try to remove this, you can't. It just turns great. It's white without detail. And that is just a a tricky thing to deal with. And there's not one solution for it, and I'll just get rid of it. But it's again. It's a little bit about the timing and the selecting of these of these images. And sometimes we might just mask out that layer during during that and wait for maybe hopefully another train to come by because obviously we're committing to star trails here. So I would assume this is a stack of star trails and we're probably looking at again, probably something like 15 minutes, 30 minutes star trails. So we're committing to that. But we're also that means we're also committing to doing it multiple times. So multiple, five minute times or whatever you might have. But it might be going back into that original image of that and kind of maybe masking out this and hopefully another train comes by or something else that we can kind of maybe blend that highlight or deal with it. I like the star points, but it just where we can under expose that one kind of coming through that we that we kind of deal with, because the grass and everything else is really well it There's a lot of information here, so again kind of playing with under exposing some of these and hopefully again, it's not one train an hour, but we're getting one train every 15 minutes that we can kind of play with an experiment. But this is really I love again. The complementary color, the complementary Coetzee's of the Blue and the Yellow and then red Stop sign Boy that all those Stein all those signs really kind of pop and zinc. So one crazy thing would be some pioneers and trained photography back in the day that use flash balls. O Winston Link. Yeah, if you use like some radio triggers and some flashes, maybe you could get the flashes while their way down there to eliminate the side of the train. And maybe, I don't know, cap off for a little bit for that one second where it's pointing or like the tent three seconds where the latest pointing directly at you and just creatively try and not have that flair out in your lens. It's tough because it's not like we can just step to a different side because you really want the North Star that information over there that's that's vital to the composition So that means you have to deal with that train coming. That so it's This is a tough thing that would require multiple images and multiple blending modes. That would probably be a class into itself. Okay, beautiful. Well, I want to see this. We have a suitable Ah, I want to go there. It's about night photography. Should make you feel, in my opinion, just wow, full moon. Yeah. Yeah, a great compositional choices on the edge here. It leads you down in two or it leads you over. And both of those places are great destinations. Because once you come around here, I'm just going to do with my hands. Won't you come around here? The bowl? You're going to come back up on the ridge and you're going to see what's obviously the most important point of the photograph, which is the summit of the mountain. I. I like that. It's it's lately. Cool. I know that it's nighttime. If this were perfectly daylight balanced, I would not feel as like, slightly chilly. When I look at this, I'm glad I'm wearing a sweater, you know, like even though there's grass down there, I know that there's no nearby and I want I want to feel, um I want to feel cold with this and I do It's a little bit warm and a little bit cool. I know it's hard like there's a little bit of red in there, but it's on the cooler side. When you blend those two together, it feels distant and painterly. Ah, ends. Yeah, yeah, I do. I do want to see a little bit more stars, if possible. I know that there's full moon out, but we're We're in an opposite quadrant of the sky from the stars. So maybe a little bit more processing to pull out some of the stars. Local adjustments with a brush, and we can make some of those pop out a little bit more. But there's enough there to give you evidence that it's a night photograph, so you might not need to work that hard on it. But what might see this as a star trail too going on here? People think this is a great opportunity, actually, since this is a Star point photograph, perhaps the photographer did this. We asked for still photographs to be submitted, but if you took a sequence of short 32nd or 22nd exposure in stack those turn that into both of stack and a time lapse, and then you have three opportunities for art or media. You have a beautiful print like this that somebody would be proud to put about their couch. Honestly, uh, and then you have that star stack, which you don't know what it is until you process it right. And the moon is gonna move during that time. So the shadows are gonna change your blending of shadows, too. But you're also gonna have that time lapse. The time lapse will turn into something that really popular today for a reason. Because they look great. And that's you could see that shadow kind of crawling around the image. So right those 32nd stacks can be used. You have that information that you cannot outsource three different ways. Start start points, star trails or time lives. That's what that's That's a productive night. Yeah, you know, that's that's That's a productive night for camera one. Yeah, that's phenomenal. Temper. One more. All right. We'll squeeze one more in their cool. Wow. All right, so thank you. We'll end on a star trail. Thank you. Um, now, this person is definitely from Seattle with those like those. This is the Seattle Seahawks, sort of highlight color right there. But, wow, you never see this many stars or this long of a star trail in the city. So this is like kudos for really kind of coming out there and and experimenting with this. It's so it's interesting, you know, this is a black and white image, except for you know, that highlight to do it perfectly. Right. So this is I mean, this is definitely a Seahawks fan. That's why we're having this discussion here, but a good handling of both, you know, different types of light sources. Right here. This is a heavily defused light source. But then we have the star points from these other direct light sources here and here. Everything is well handled, so this would require a little bit of blending in photo shop. But, boy, man, look at the start trail. So this, you know, this is really cool. I mean, this this person set up for a few hours here, at least this is someone who is at the heart of what we're asking people to dio which is to get creative. Thank you very much. On I love that blew that duo tone. You mentioned the duo tone. Thanks. Cool sort of science type blue But then we have that blend of that Seahawk, You know that we have going on so that this is great too, I think a great shot to end with and, um perfect. Wow, it was really special having you here with us. We hope that it provided you with an even higher level of feedback on what you're trying to dio making night photography. We certainly felt great having energy from you. Thanks for coming with us. And thanks. Everybody else's tuning in now and in the future. Uh, we really, really appreciate that. Um, we have, ah program where if you're really, really interested in doing this and beautiful spaces outdoors like national parks, national parks, at night dot com, we teach many workshops per year in different combinations of teachers you might get gave, gave and I or different pairings of the five teachers, we have all of them participated. Night Photographer week. So you get a taste of that. I would like to have two instructors in less than 14 students. So very hands on. Yeah, it's a hands off hand and workshop. Yeah, So you get very personal experience. We do the social thing. You can see our Facebook and Instagram there. Uh, we love feedback. So if you want to have further conversations with us, please join us. We'd love to talk about photography, especially not photography. Uh, my email address is Matt in national parks at night dot com his game national parks at night dot com. Uh, pretty simple. Uh, yeah. And most of all, we just want express our gratitude to creativelive and tell you the students Ah, you are what keeps us going, uh, give us a place to express what we love doing the most, which is inspiring people and teaching them how to take that inspiration further. Uh, and we want to do more of that. So, um, keep sharing. Yeah, keep experimenting. And above all, keep seizing the night. That's right. Yeah. So we want you to share your work. You're just a reminder that it's possible to keep the conversation going on. Creative life. Also in the student work section of night photography week. Keep submitting photographs and you can do what we did today with each other. Part of learning photography is also the next level Up is providing feedback to others. There's a courage and offering your opinion to other people. We did that today for you, right? So if you take a time to be generous with other people by leaving comments on their photographs, you can further help them grow. In addition to helping you grow by having to form thoughts about other people's photography and having the courage to share that that will help all of us get better. In addition, talking to us, you should definitely talk with each other and definitely keep experimenting. If you choose to go outside of your comfort zone, you feel those little butterflies. You're in the right place. Photography is is interesting, and it's fun ends in some measure. It's not easy. We hope that we took you out of the It's not easy until you can do it, because we believe that and we try stuff that we don't believe we can do all the time. So keep that, take it forward, keep on creating and, ah, again deepest of gratitude from us. Uh, thank you. Thank you. And keep it's good being with you. Get here, Matt. Life. Why? We don't get me a lot. That's right. Right. Live in So on that. No, we just want to say thanks for coming out again. Ah, and we will see you on the Internet in a national park or perhaps in a city near you as we continue to go out and teach more about night photography, I Yeah. So Astro Photography Landscape Photography Night Portrait's scouting all the good stuff. Find it in Night Photography week. And, uh, we hope to see you again sometime soon. Keep sharing, and that's a wrap.