Even though my full-time job is wedding photography, my photographic hobby is the polar opposite! Â I enjoy photographing nightscapes in the desert, the more remote the better! Â Here is a relatively easy-access location, Rhyolite Ghost Town, which is just outside of Death Valley National Park. Â I have been photographing this old bank’s cement skeleton now since 2005, and it never disappoints!
The Photo
 
The Equipment and Settings
- Nikon D700
- Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 AFS-G @ 24mm
- Oben Tripod & ballhead
- 30 sec @ f/2.8 & ISO 6400
- Manual exposure, manual WB, RAW
The Shooting Conditions
When you get away from the light pollution of a major city or sprawling suburb, you run out of light in your night sky pretty quickly! Â The night sky, without any moonlight present, usually exposes well at about 6400 ISO, f/2.8, and 30 sec. Â Then the problem simply is, how to light your foreground!
This location just happens to have a lone street light that is a few hundred yards away, and it is providing 100% of the illumination you see here. Â The white balance for this shot wound up around 3,000 Kelvin, which balanced nicely between the deep blue starry night sky and the slightly warm brick walls.
I did click a few other exposures, of course, with lower ISO’s, tighter apertures, for better image quality. Â However I kept this 30 sec exposure as my favorite because the longer shutter speeds caused the milky way to start blurring. Â Actually, if you notice towards the upper left corner of the image, you can very clearly see the Andromeda galaxy, which at ~2.5 million light years away is the closest (spiral) galaxy to earth!
The Post-Processing
I’m having a lot of fun with Lightroom 5 Beta! The processing for this image was a combination of my usual Lightroom 4 workflow using the SLR Lounge Preset system, and trying out a few of the new features in LR5 Beta.
One tip for those of you who are trying out the LR5 Beta: If you’re trying to use the auto-perspective tools to straighten an image like this that only has strong vertical lines, definitely be sure to apply the lens profile correction first otherwise LR5 Beta will have a hard time figuring out what you want to do. Â But once you set that up, you get pretty good results automatically!
Another thing I played around with a little bit was the radial gradient tool. Â Instead of using it to vignette an image like Adobe has thus far demonstrated, I actually used it to do two simple burn dodge adjustments. Â I darkened the highlights on the building a little bit, and brightened up the milky way a little bit. Â (The winter milky way, though it puts the Andromeda galaxy in such a beautiful spot in the sky, is not nearly as bright as the summer milky way.)
I’m sure I could have gotten the same results in Lightroom 4 with a little more effort, but it was fun and efficient to be able to do it this way.
Take care, and happy clicking!
=Matthew Saville=
