Illuminate Final and Evaluation
For this shoot, I made sure I set up facing west, so that there would still be some colour and detail in the sky after the sun had set. I had my camera on a tripod and used a remote trigger to release the shutter so that a) there wouldn’t be any camera shake due to the long exposure time, and b) I could run around and light the parts that I needed to, which I did with an LED panel. I initially tried to get everything lit in a single shot, but soon realised this wouldn’t work as I was getting light trails in the shot and the light on the fountain looked very flat, so I decided to light each part separately, and put the images together in Photoshop afterwards. I lit the left and right halves from the side of each, rather than from the front, so that there would be shadow detail giving shape to the designs on the fountain. I also lit the top of the fountain a little and the trees to either side of it.
Post-production: I selected nine images in Bridge, then clicked on Tools -> Photoshop -> Load files into Photoshop layers. Next I aligned them by selecting all of them, then going to Edit -> Auto-align layers and selecting the auto option. I had to crop the sides a bit after that as I’d obviously moved the tripod a little while shooting. I had the layers in the order of darkest at the bottom to lightest at the top. This meant the image I shot last, when the light was totally gone from the sky, would be my base image and starting point. I “turned on” just the bottom layer by holding down Alt and clicking the eyeball icon next to that layer. This turns off all the other layers except that one. I then clicked the eyeball icon for the layer above that, meaning I could now see it, and changed the blending mode to Lighten, then right-clicked on the layer -> Copy layer style, selected the rest of the layers, right-click on one of them -> Paste layer style. This changes the blending mode of all the layers to Lighten, so you can then see the effect each one has on the image as you turn on each eyeball icon. At this point I decided the top three images were too bright and flat, so I just ended up using six out of the nine. Out of these, there were a few that worked with the image but were just a little too bright so I brought down the opacity of a couple and added layer masks to two of them where the adjustment had to be more specific.
On the whole, I’m quite pleased with how this image turned out, although I had originally wanted to play around with coloured gels but due to time constraints and a lack of clear evenings at the time, I stuck with the simpler option.
