long shutter night HDR, no tripod..

[arlon]

I had a weekend trip to Dallas and wanted to catch a few shots where I stayed. I had my camera but no tripod. I wanted to do an HDR shot but shutter speed would have to be around 30 sec for the slowest shot. What to do??

Take of my tennis shoe and set it on a bench. The shoe made a great rest for the camera. Next was to figure out how to get the 3 three exposures I needed without touching the camera.

First set the D90 to 3 shot auto bracket mode, set the self timer to 10 seconds and number of shots to three, use manual mode with shutter set on 20 seconds. Get the camera adjusted in the shoe, trip the shutter and stand back.

Crazy lights actually made the shot more interesting to me..

Shots where 10, 20 and 30 seconds at ISO 200 and f6.7.
Combined in Photomatix.


LARGER IMAGE


Same basic setup but with my shoe sitting on the green in the middle of a golf course instead of the bench. That tennis shoe is quite the versatile camera support!


LARGER IMAGE


Caution should be exercised as this could be dangerous if you tripped over something with your shoe off

[windrider86]

Wow, those are freaky skies. Amazing that you could sit still long enough to get more than one exposure let alone just one that is good enough to print

[douglas]

Amazing..."tennis shoe tripod" Use what you got!!!!

[equilution]

Sweet shots, Arlon! Once again, you've set the bar....now I gotta try it! Thanks for sharing!

Jim

[Dirt_Bike_Ryda]

i like it.. only for the green..did you shoot RAW?

[arlon]

I kind of liked the green tint (it was the best of two evils). If you remove the green, it goes red. There are two VERY different light sources and it's impossible to balance them. At least the green compliments the grass. Setting the WB to get rid of the green makes for a very unusual orange cast and the incandescent lights go very red. Yes I shot RAW/jpg.

With lighting like this, I don't think there is much to do unless you want to start getting into masking areas and channel swapping etc. Picture is really a snapshot and just doesn't warrant that kind of effort to me..

As for the "freaky" skies, the clouds where really moving fast and the 30 second exposure smooths them out considerably. Odd city light reflecting off of them too. They where kind of freaky before trying to capture them on digits. (-:}

[Dirt_Bike_Ryda]

arrghhh... don't change the WB to remove the green. dig a little deeper into camera RAW and you will find colour sliders, one for most colours ( i think there is about 7 or 8 ). and there is a hue, saturation and luminance of each slider. so your can realy edit the colours.. and easily. =]*

[arlon]

Originally Posted by Dirt_Bike_Ryda

arrghhh... don't change the WB to remove the green. dig a little deeper into camera RAW and you will find colour sliders, one for most colours ( i think there is about 7 or 8 ). and there is a hue, saturation and luminance of each slider. so your can realy edit the colours.. and easily. =]*

Thanks for that, I'll look for it.

[thaoimage]

Really nice compromise with the shoe tripod and the shots came out great!

[leonaashlee]

I like these a lot.