140 Minutes of the Night. My longest exposure!

Flaming balls of gas tearing through the black of night to become whirling embers silhouetting the horizon. Yes, please! This place was pretty amazing. This old tree in the forest outskirts of the Grand Canyon sits in the clearing, dwarfed by the vast sparkling night sky and it was beautiful. At 2 hours and 20 minutes, this is my longest exposure to date. OK, maybe on some of my large format film I’ve played with longer. But this is my longest on digital and my longest success. We were in the hills near Grand Canyon NP, an area known for its views of the night sky. We set up camp in the open woods about a hundred yards from this tree and I had been eyeing it for a couple days. There was just something awesome about its barren leaf-less branches. I spent over an hour roaming around the tree from every angle, trying to see it in different ways as the sun set. I found best angle and set up the gear in preparation for the night. The result, after about two hours and twenty minutes of exposure, is 140 minutes of the night.

How it was made…

Canon 5D MK2, 24mm TS-e II, f8, ISO100, exposure 140 min main exposure.

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I’m going to go into candid here. I spent over an hour walking around the tree and testing angles, focus, and composition. I also tried various shift settings with my 24mm tilt shift lens to control perspective until I found the one that I felt the most natural, shifting just a bit up to reduce the distortion of the tree.

I don’t believe I’ve ever spent this long planning a composition. Some might say there’s no way I could spend so long and still be improving it, but that’s wrong. Taking the time on this was, in my opinion, one of the most important factors in this image. Thinking an image thru always makes a difference. But in mastering night landscapes, I learned that pre-planning and setup is perhaps our most valuable tool. More on that below.

When I finally decided on a spot I kept tweaking and focusing, then going in the camper to analyze it on the laptop. My planning was purposeful because my exposure was so long and I had one shot. I would be shooting in the dark so I set up the camera exactly where it would be and left it until that time came. This paid off, giving me far more control than a last minute night composition using the high ISO technique I described in this post.

A few hours later, the sun was gone, and true night had set in. I already had an idea what exposure I would need from previous nigh work, but I had done a few test shots to verify that I wanted about 2 hours. I took a high ISO exposure, not for composition, but to roughly test length of exposure, I would be using at my low ISO. There’s a post here on that. The image in it is little more than a test, but the exposure method works.

Making the star trail.

A lot of folks in the digital world use a stacking technique here where they take many shorter exposures of the night sky and then blend them in post using software. This can produce beautiful results and there nothing wrong with that method. But it does not produce the same look and personally, I prefer the in-camera approach of long methodical exposures like we did in the film days.

I started the frame, locking into bulb using my cable release. Then I returned to the camper, and my alarm went off 2 hours and 15 minutes later. I went out, being very careful not to shine a flashlight near the scene or lens which would ruin my image in an instant.

I had black frame noise reduction set to auto. You can learn more about it here if you are not familiar with it, but essentially it takes an equal length exposure with the lens blacked out to capture hot pixels on the sensor against black, allowing them to be mapped and removed. But it didn’t work and the camera did not do an auto dark frame. The camera did not count that high and maybe it lost track of how long the exposure was. It seems to stop counting at about 35 minutes bit the image did not stop recording.

After the exposure, I went into the camper for review. It looked good, and the regular ISO noise was not bad at all thanks to ISO 100. What I thought were hot pixels, however, were BAD and LR could not take those out. That said, it could have been worse. It was cool outside and the higher the outside temperature, the more the sensor heats up and produces this type of artifact.

I immediately decided to make a dark frame manually. This is a common approach done by setting the camera in the same conditions and taking an equal length exposure with the lens cap on. It was late, so I set an alarm and set the camera outside starting the exposure and went to bed, bringing it in and stopping the exposure when the alarm expired. Another 140-minute black exposure.

Making it POP

Next was post-process. If you’re still reading this, you get the gritty details. I started in LR with my presets, then went into the sliders, working the color, noise, and detail carefully to get everything as good as I could before going to Photoshop.

Understand with night images that the night is dark. Cameras are made to see best in the light. As often happens with night images and RAW files the light and color were flat. I had top boost the highlight a lot to bring out the separation of stars. Ditto for other settings. This is something you have to expect. The sky is deep with stars and even the one you can’t see backlight that sky. That means to make the stars stand out that separation has to be defined and this is especially true with digital raw files since they shoot flat giving us lots of information to work with.

Don’t shoot the night in JPEG. You may get a bit more pop but it will fall apart with the amount of boosting you typically need to do. After RAW processing I went into PS with the main image and added the twilight image. I very gently masked in the area around the trees, bringing in detail to prevent the foreground from being black, but not so much as to become a distraction. The silhouetted tree is still my subject.

Exposures and noise.

This is two exposures. The secondary is just for detail and manually blended. I took a frame of the final composition just as the sun set and that frame retained detail in the foreground.

This basic look achieved, I set to work trying to get rid of those pesky artifacts that you can see in the example below. I started with basic black frame reduction. Bringing my dark frame of equal exposure into PS, I laid it over the image, then set its blending mode to difference. The goal here is to take the spots of the image and effectively subtract them with the ones mapped on the black frame. I tweaked with the opacity to avoid them appearing as darker dots, and that was the process.

It worked. But not enough. I continued to use variations of the black frame with different settings, using the same approach but hoping to target pixels differently. It’s normal to use multiple layers when doing this manually, and, again, this helped, but I was not home free; I wanted a large wall print of this. I may have been better off to make two or three dark frames to get slightly differing, hot pixel patterns, though that would have taken most the night.

After this, I then used Topaz De-Noise on a copied layer of the main image. Even though this is not normal noise, it did help out. But to avoid killing the detail I could not apply the Topaz too heavily. I was getting closer, but there were still dots.

Fixing the really bad heat spots.

After hours of working with this image, researching alternate ideas, and trying in various ways to destroy the dots, I was closer but not as close as I wanted. I won’t go into all my tests, but using everything I described above, I finally added a merged copy of the main image layer group with all the previous corrections combined into it. I then used the de-speckle tool in PS, and this helped a lot but left the image with a huge loss of detail.

So I made a copy of the layer and boosted up its contrast with curves and levels to the point at which it was way overdone and had ultra hard edges. Then hit select all on the contrasting layer (cmd +a), copied it and turned it off. I added a mask to the de-specked layer, and, instead of mask painting with a brush, I Opt (Alt) clicked the mask icon to bring it into mask view mode. Then I posted the actual contrasted image over it as a mask (cmd + v) which made a grayscale mask that matched the contrasted image. This masked away hard edges and detail on the de-specked image, revealing the more detailed layers below.

It printed really good.

Cameras have come a long way since this exposure was made, but sensors still face the same problems. Taking the time to set up, plan, review and process this carefully gave me an image I can be proud of and one that looks great on the wall.

I know this is complicated but I wanted to outline what I did here for you and for myself. Maybe you don’t care about how it was made, but I hope you enjoy the final result none the less.