Don Smith Photography's Blog
Garrapata Dawn
Posted by Don Smith (California, United States) on 19 March 2009 in Landscape & Rural.
This was the first image I made last week at Big Sur's Garrapata State Park of a setting full moon (35 minutes prior to posted sunrise). One of the pleasure's of working with digital is the sensor's ability to see color when our eyes cannot. At certain low illumination levels, the rods in our eyes begin transmitting black-and-white signals to the brain; only when brightness levels increase does our cones begin sending color signals (this is the explanation from some prominent eye doctors - not my own). Nonetheless, the colors with digital capture are there and one does not have to concern themselves with reciprocity failure!
Such was the case with this 4-minute timed-exposure. I decided to leave my polarizer on as it did increase the saturation in the moon's warm reflection. The trade-off was the two stops of light I was losing. I'm always conscious of the moon's movement in my frame, but with the knowledge that the moon moves one degree every four minutes, and shooting with a 16-35mmL at 25mm, the horizontal angle-of-view was roughly 71 degrees; I felt I could live with a 1/71th degree of movement. Contrast this with a 300mm lens, where the horizontal angle-of-view is 5 degrees, and the moon's movement would have been 1/5th of the frame!
I metered this scene by spotting off the water. My Canon 1DsMKIII can be set for 30 seconds (before having to set bulb mode). I opened my aperture to f4.0 and the meter showed perfect exposure. From there is was a matter of simple math. I felt f/11 would hold detail from foreground to infinity, so, I knew I would have to add three stops of light and this was how I arrived at the 4 minute exposure (30 seconds to 1 minute = 1 stop; 1 minute to 2 minutes = 2 stops; and 2 minutes to 4 minutes = 3 stops).
Lastly, I made sure my long exposure noise reduction (black frame subtraction) was turned on. I did use an ISO of 100 to minimize noise (in retrospect, I probably could have used 200 ISO and cut my exposure to two minutes - but hey it was early and I hadn't had much coffee!)
Hopefully this image illustrates the ability of digital capture during low light levels. Get out on location at least 30 minutes prior to sunrise and stay out at least 30 minutes after sunset. Dawn and dusk images can elevate your photography from ordinary to extraordinary!
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Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III
245 seconds
F/11.0
ISO 100
25 mm