CJ Kern Photography | A New Jersey based Portrait, Event and Fine Art Photographer

'Across The Universe' ~ Acadia National Park, Maine

This week one of my photographs is featured on Craft & Vision’s community blog, where photographers discuss (not critique) a photograph. David DuChemin describes it as “What we’re hoping for is a growing sense of literacy where photographs are concerned. If you were an author wanting to better understand how to write, understanding how people read would be a non-negotiable. It’s the same with photographs. If you want to create better photographs, you have to understand how people will read them.”

So one of the things asked about the image was how was it taken and I’d thought I’d share that information with you here as well.  The photograph above is not the same one being discussed (it already appeared here) but this was taken the same evening and the techniques used are the same.

First and most importantly is what are you trying to ‘say’ with the photograph?  For this photograph I wanted to capture the STARS! I live in the suburbs of New York City and I never see stars like this. The night sky was my main focus and for me the rest of the landscape was playing a supporting role.

Some people questioned whether it was a composite image or not, it is not. It is a single 73 second exposure, however there was post processing done to create what you see here. I shot this in RAW file format at 200 ISO, which was done purposely to reduce the digital noise giving me room in Lightroom to dodge (lighten) everything from the foreground down by about 2 stops. I also shot it wide open (f/2.8) to give me the shortest exposer time (since I was using such a slow ISO) to help reduce the movement of the stars in the sky.  I then brought it into Lightroom 3 where I enabled lens correction to adjust the distortion caused by using such a wide angle. I used Lightroom to decrease the noise that was created in the image when I dodge in the foreground. It would have been worse if I had used a faster ISO. Lastly, I selected a medium contrast point curve and kicked up the clarity and the vibrance sliders.

That’s it.

I really can’t believe that we are down to less than 2 weeks left in the year!  Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season…