Shutter Mike Photography

After photographing the fireworks last week I decided to try some more night time photography.  South Mountain in Phoenix is known for its sunset and city lights views.  A short drive up to the 2600 foot summit gets you to a great lookout over the city perfect for photographing the sky and city below.

This was definitely a trial and error process for me as I am taking the camera off the auto mode and manually adjusting the settings.  For this shoot I played with shutter speed to see what I got and hopefully learn something in the process.  Ideally I should not be focusing on one setting in the “Exposure Triangle” and leaving the others to default, but I am trying one step at a time.

I got some fair pictures but better yet learned a few things in the process…

• As with shooting fireworks timing is everything.  Lesson learned: get to the destination early enough (in this case before the sun starts setting) to stake out a good spot and get everything set up.  For photographing city lights twilight is ideal rather than when the sky is completely dark.
• Tripod, tripod, tripod.  My camera has image stabilization built into the body.  But at slow shutter speed a tripod is critical.  A remote would have helped too.
• Underexposure and overexposure are very easy to do.  If I had adjusted the aperture and ISO as well as the shutter speed I’m sure I could have improved exposure greatly.  Otherwise I need to experiment more to find a happy medium.  Or there are some Photoshop tricks to adjust this after the fact.  But I prefer to get it right without having to do too much editing.

Original Image             Corrected in PhotoShop

Click the images to see larger versions.

These photos are the result of playing around with some Photoshop filters on the same fire hydrant photograph taken at Chandler Gilbert Community College.

Original Version

Glowing Edges

Cut Out

Neon Glow - Blue

Neon Glow - Pink

Neon Glow - Green

Click on the images for a larger version.

Since photos float around the Internet rather easily nowadays and many people consider it “free for the taking” if it is posted online, I thought this tutorial I ran across might be useful to share.  It requires some basic Photoshop skills but the how-to is well written and pretty easy to follow.

Batch Watermarking & Adding Copyright with Photoshop

I have taken one Photoshop class and do not use it too much on my photography other than to fix a few distortions or remove red eye.  But there is so much you can do with it and I like playing around in it.  Learning more about Photoshop and practicing on my photos is definately on my to-do list.

I stumbled upon this great site with Photoshop tutorials.   The one I am starting out with is 50 Great Photoshop Tutorials for Clever Beginners. It gives step-by-step tutorials on 50 different things you can do with Photoshop.  I will post the results as soon as I get some results that I am happy with.