I’ve been after shooting a long exposure of this crossroads for a little while now, and after a short walk to the local Tesco I decided to just grab it, so I popped the camera in my bag along with my Gorillapod and set to work.
10 minutes later, I packed up and headed home. I knew I’d need to edit the photos - after all there were no architectural lights on the church itself, so the dynamic range was far too wide for any camera to be realistically expected to capture.
Back at home, I loaded the images into Lightroom, did the basic edits such as cropping then exported it Photoshop to merge them as an HDR image. Only two to worry about so all was quick and easy enough. A couple of sensor spots taken care of and then back to Lightroom to finish off.
I wanted to add a vignette to the whole image at first but it cut into the bottom two corners too much, so I simply applied a grad onto the top right corner, reducing the exposure, then duplicated it and placed it to the top left. Clarity, texture, Sharpening, and noise reduction completed the task and left this image behind.
I will possibly reshoot this, maybe another time of year, or on a cloudy night to get some additional texture in the sky, and if I do I might shoot at a wider aperture to reduce the light stars coming off the streetlamps - I can’t help but feel they’re a little intrusive.
Let me know in the comments below what you think!
📷 Nikon Z50 / 16-50mm f/3.5-6.3 VR
⏱ 25s f16, ISO 100
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