Photo by Mark Drudge
Christmas Colors on Shade of Grey
I captured this image at Disney in December 2021 with my Nikon D750 and 24-120 lens.
It is a view of main street looking from the castle towards the Christmas Tree. The view is unique because it is devoid of people, which is something you never see at the theme park. I accomplished this by waiting till the very end of the after-hours event, and then shooting very long exposures, using ISO50, F/10, and stacked neutral density filters, so that the few people remaining would “disappear” from the scene as long as they kept moving.
But to capture the entire dynamic range, from the dark shadows to the very bright lights, I decided to shot it as an HDR image. I positioned the camera on a tripod, low to the ground and captured the bracketed long-exposures using a remote. Total exposure time was a couple of minutes.
Post processing notes:
I first combined the bracketed exposures using the On1 Merge to HDR, and adjusted the parameters to suit my vision. I cropped the image slightly, and used NoNoise A.I. to de-noise and sharpen. Then in Effects I applied a B&W effect to the entire image. After that, using the brush tool, I selectively removed the B&W effect from the Christmas decorations and the tree to expose the colors. Then I used Resize A.I. to upscale the cropped image 200%.Exif information:
| Copyright: | Derek Drudge |
| Camera: | NIKON D750 |
| Aperture: | f/10 |
| Focal Length: | 24mm |
| ISO: | 50 |
| Shutter Speed: | 8/1 sec. |
| Created: | December 3, 2021 02:52:41 |