An Overly Enhanced Photo
Before sunrise photo of the MetLife Blimp, San Marcos, TX
The above unprocessed photo was taken at 7:22 AM, October 20, 2012. The MetLife blimp (Snoopy II) had flown into the San Marcos airport (ICAO: KHYI) and was moored just south of runway 8/26. The blimp had internal lights so this was an experiment to see if I could capture a reasonable night image and show the blimp's lighting to some advantage. The processed photo is shown below.
Equipment
Camera
Sony A-77 - hand held
Settings
ISO 1250; Shutter 1/80; f5.0; EV: 0; Image taken in JPEG
Problems
The mercury vapor lighting of Gary Job Corp. limited some of the night effect I had hoped to acquire. In addition, the broken cloud layer, while visible, did not show the reflected light colors I was seeing with my eye. Pushing the ISO up to 1250 caused a bit of noise in the photo, but it was not excessive.
Processing
The photo was processed using Gimp.
My initial objective in processing was to just bring out the red, green and blue light reflection from the clouds. As I adjusted the color curves, a speckled texture began creeping in. Carrying this further I ended up with a poster effect. But I began to really see the reflected blues, reds and greens from the clouds.
I also began to see the aircraft and hangers on the ramp in much better detail and the mercury vapor lights gave a more pronounced halo effect. I decided I liked the surreal effect and it seemed to capture an emotion of a larger than life airship.
No cropping was applied.
To see full size rendering, click here.