Painting with light at the Vietnam Memorial, Washington Monument in the backdrop, Washington, DC
One of my students and I did a painting with light session last night at the Vietnam Memorial. Our favorite takes had the long wall of the memorial, together with the ground lights and pavement, form graphic lines all leading in the distance to a single point…the base of the Washington Monument. In these last photos of the night, we used the camera in bulb mode to allow for longer shutter speeds, with a remote switch to trigger the shutter. We faced the camera and burned in a peace symbol with a flashlight at aperture f/11, shutter speed 240 sec., ISO 100.
Later in Photoshop, I added a second layer with another image taken at a 30 second shutter speed and focused on the Washington Monument instead of on the writing on the Vietnam Memorial. Using layer masking, I painted in the darker sky from the second image, the sharper Washington Monument, as well as the left side of the pavement, to increase the tonal contrast between the left and right sides of the walkway. That also gave me sharper ground lights. (For the first image, I wanted the writing on the memorial close to the camera to be in sharp focus, which led to increasing blur going out. My layer masking combine with an image focused on the Washington Monument gives me sharp focus on important spots throughout. Make sense?) I also did a slight fix to my peace symbol. Finishing touch – lens correction, where I pulled out the top right and bottom left corners of the image to eliminate the perspective distortion resulting from my wide angle lens. D’ya like the result?
Irene, This is just superb.