Story of... Out After Midnight

Posted as an insight to this image on flickr of a long exposure star trail over a small island.

The changes were tiny at first, and I barely noticed them.

But soon the patches of darkness caused by increasing distances between streetlights meant there were places for people to hide. I stopped beneath a lamp to question whether I was doing the right thing, out after midnight in a town I don't know in a country whose language I don't speak.

On the one hand I was tired, having walked many km over the last 24 hrs looking for potential locations; my legs were starting to whisper that they didn't have much left in them.

On the other hand, I hadn't seen a soul since I left the hotel so what were the chances of needing to flee from an aggressive stranger?

Turning Point: where the houses started to change (© Google)

I looked to where I'd come from. And turned back to face where I'd been heading. Behind me, small houses, low apartment blocks, taller towers of flats and the distant glow of the city. Ahead of me small houses, bigger houses, bigger houses with more land. The cars got newer and shinier.

It wasn't until I saw a small dinghy in someone's front garden that I knew my hunch was going to pay off. Looking out over water from this near-island city would mean looking towards nothing but clear dark skies. Shuffling my camera over my shoulder felt reassuring, serving as a reminder how I'd found myself in this moment.

I walked on.

Just a few hundred metres further I found the lake and spent a few minutes watching the settled mist on the water. One of the most common disruptions to night photography is a lens that won't stop misting over. Would it happen to me? Hopefully the time spent with gear over my shoulder had allowed it to adjust to the ambient temperature.

Nearly... couldn't make a landscape version work

To the right of the island, Orion had just risen above the waterlogged horizon. With its 7 bright stars, Orion would have left a landscape frame too imbalanced so I set up vertically, taking extra time in the extreme darkness to align the horizon precisely.

When I'm out on location, one of the ways I double-check my alignments is to fire off a test shot then zoom in to a horizontal or vertical line within the frame to see if it runs parallel to the margins of the camera's preview screen. Unable to make out any usable reference points, it took several attempts on this occasion.

Having gone to the expense of hiring a fast, wide lens, I wanted to shoot at f/1.4 so that was the first setting to get dialled in. My ISO started at 200 which is the native setting on the D300- the point at which its most comfortable; the point with the most dynamic range.

Next up, 30sec on the exposure duration. It's the longest most cameras will expose for without manual intervention which makes it ideal for star trails where you want to fire off dozens of frames continuously with the cable release locked down.

I shot a frame at those settings and reviewed: the stars were coming through just fine but the scene was darker than I liked. I added light with exposure adjustments and a minor ISO shift then set the shutter running.

Couple of little tips for you: an intervalometer would have made things so much easier than standing next to the camera throughout the exposure, clicking the shutter cable closed then open again at a precise frequency. Without the intervalometer I ran the risk of missing an interval, or knocking the tripod, or some other element of human error. As it was, the timer on my phone alerted me to each passing minute and, fortunately, things turned out good.

Secondly, standing in the dark my camera becomes the brightest object around when I preview my shots. The LCD brightness is turned down to compensate but I always add up to 2/3rds stop of light to what looks like the right settings, just to be sure.

Starting to feel the cold of the Finnish autumn and aching from shutter RSI, it was time to pack up, but not yet time to let my guard down. With the reverse walk ahead of me I pocketed the memory card, a habit to safeguard my work, and headed back to the hotel.

Route: Thankfully I travelled light for the walk (© Google)

At home, I'd have fired up the MacBook straight away to start with the process of stacking. A room full of family told me that was a bad idea so the PP waited till morning.

For a single frame of pinprick stars an optimised image requires more extensive PP. But with startrails filling the sky so comprehensively, the effort invested in setting up the camera on-location means a light-handed approach to PP is fine. Camera JPGs were stacked in StarStaX before being imported to PS for minor tweaks to WB, contrast and saturation.

I guess the changes are tiny, and you'd barely notice them.

How to... light-painted domes

Scientists, IT consultants, mathematicians, doctors, my gran and a geologist. Nope, not the invite list for Party of The Year- it's a cross section of the hundreds, maybe even thousands of people around the world who've been amazed, intrigued and puzzled by The Dome since it first hit flickr in May 2010. And they're going to be even more, erm, cross when they find out just how straightforward the technique is. Well, not my gran if I'm honest - she's all over it. But all the others are true.

Let me say this. I've enjoyed the buzz - who wouldn't? The emails I get every day bear witness to the interest it's created. I think my favourite thing is seeing comments from light painters who've been inspired to reverse engineer the tool and are rightfully proud of achieving that.

But alas, just as numerous dome artists are now springing up around the globe, sooner or later someone's gonna want to get their name in lights with a tutorial about how it's done - so I'm getting in first.

Before I spill the beans though, I need to get out what a relief it is for it not to be under wraps any more. In trying to keep people guessing, I ended up stifling my own creativity for fear of giving out too many clues. For instance - you've never seen me produce a multicolour dome, or a dome with deliberate large gaps. In my mind, both of those would have opened the tool up to close scrutiny so remained on my to-do list for when the shape became as commonplace as the orb. In reality, both have now been done by others (and done well, for the record) and still light junkies en masse are none the wiser.

There's a lesson in there - be motivated for the right reasons.

So, without further delay, let me introduce you to The Dome and tell you not only how to make your own but how to wield it like a pro.

All you need

• 1 bike wheel. Any regular circle will do but bike wheels are essentially hollow and that see-throughness helps with the 3D illusion 
• 1 set of 20 or so festive lights from your seasonal surplus superstore
• An axle, cut to the length of the wheel's radius 

What you do
1) Evenly space the lights around the rim of the wheel.

• The further out you go, the more the bottom of your dome shape will appear as a point, not a curve. 
• In the early sessions I spent forever doing running repairs as LEDs would get knocked out of position or whatever - this idea for fixing using tiny zip ties comes from flickr's own LED Eddie who, coincidentally, was the first to demonstrate he'd work out the dome technique. 

2) Fix the axle firmly to the wheel's hub.

• When the tool is in its primed position, the highest point of the wheel rim should be directly above the pivot point. 

3) Switch the lights on and roll the wheel around smoothly and at a steady pace.

• In this shot I've set up the tool ready to go and lit it so it's visible in the shot. Then I created a dome that looks overlaid on top of the tool. 
• I fitted cable extensions and push-to-make switches to my lights so I can get them on and off without hassle. 
• Always start with the lights facing you - any stutters/ overlap or underlap will appear at the rear of the shape away from the camera. 

4) Amaze your friends

So there it is. Go forth lightly.


Edit -


One thing I meant to reference in the original post is how because of the whole rolling round thing, domes always appear on a surface... which is why I was particularly proud of this- the first (and so far only) levitating dome

Click for "Another Level" on flickr

Heading Back (to basics)

PhotoShop, stacking, custom WB, speedlights, electronic light trickery.

Forget all that, sometimes it's good to go back to being just you and the camera.

Shot this last night and posted straight from the camera. Here's what I did and why:

Taken at twilight to get some colour in the sky- best time of day for balancing light levels in the sky and ground.

Auto white balance to make sense of the different colour temps across the scene, from the moody blue sky through LED dash, tungsten interior light and HID headlamps.

Composition was pretty limited. The Fat Gecko mount hasn't let me down yet for grip but that doesn't mean I'm up for big risks. So, the camera had to go where I could within reach of looping its strap through the roll-hoop behind the driver's seat.

Hit the dual carriageway and kept my speed to about 50mph for the best compromise between camera stability and being rear-ended by a speeding truck.

Waited until a car passed me before opening the shutter. This brought the picture to life with motion from light trails.

Positioned the door mirror so my face would be visible in the reflection. And flicked on the interior light to lift the darkness inside the car. There's two lights in the cabin of a TT roadster. The first one was in frame so I went for the other side.

Only thing that didn't work out as planned was just how much bounce my Fat Gecko mount was giving.

Updated tutorial on driving shots coming soon.