Institute Double Take

By Landon Carter Dec. 2, 2014

7175 idt — As the harsh winter begins to settle in, I wanted to take one last chance to capture a Boston sunset before the weather became too cold. Luckily, this past Sunday the temperature rose to a balmy 50 degrees, and there happened to be a beautiful sunset with a nice mix of clouds. I set up under the BU Bridge, facing southwest into the sunset. I decided to try out a technique I’d just read about, taking a series of about 300 pictures after the sun set, every 5 seconds from 5:00-5:25 p.m. (official sunset time: 4:13 p.m.). The aperture and ISO were set to maximize exposure time, helping one photo to blur into the next. Afterward, the sequence was compiled with Photoshop’s layer stacking’s lighten option, then a mixture of local noise and blur was used to remove some gradient banding. Finally, the image was processed in Lightroom for color and exposure tweaks.
Landon Carter—The Tech

As the harsh winter begins to settle in, I wanted to take one last chance to capture a Boston sunset before the weather became too cold. Luckily, this past Sunday the temperature rose to a balmy 50 degrees, and there happened to be a beautiful sunset with a nice mix of clouds. I set up under the BU Bridge, facing southwest into the sunset. I decided to try out a technique I’d just read about, taking a series of about 300 pictures after the sun set, every 5 seconds from 5:00-5:25 p.m. (official sunset time: 4:13 p.m.). The aperture and ISO were set to maximize exposure time, helping one photo to blur into the next.

Afterward, the sequence was compiled with Photoshop’s layer stacking’s lighten option, then a mixture of local noise and blur was used to remove some gradient banding. Finally, the image was processed in Lightroom for color and exposure tweaks.

Aperture:
ƒ/22

Exposure Time:
From 1/30 sec. to 2.5 sec.

Sensitivity:
ISO 100

Effective Focal Length:
50 mm