I took a nap from 9:00 - 11:30 pm and awoke to take some night sky of the Perseid Meteor Showers. I wasn't fortunate enough to capture interesting meteors. I started shooting around midnight at Sand Beach, moved to Ocean Drive at 1:00 am and the final destination of Cadillac Mountain around 2:15 am. I found some nice folks star/meteor gazing and thought they would make a nice photo under the stars. They are Tricia, Amanda, Matt, and Kasey from Buffalo, NY and they were craving chicken-wings at 2:40 am.
I'll take you through the post-proccess of this shot. This is straight out of the camera. I use tungsten for my white balance setting.
I started Lightroom with toning down the foreground and leveling the horizon. Then I brought the image into Nik - Define to smooth out some graininess, my ISO was at 2500.
Now it's time to bring out the details with Nik - Color Efects Pro:
- Tonal Contrast gives the image a little punch
- Detail Extractor brings out the detail in the stars and foreground
To finish this image, I did a tad more in Lightroom: took down some highlights in the blanket, cloned out some odd lights or sensor noise, added skin-tone color to the faces. Here's the finally image.
EXIF data: Nikon D800, Nikon 24-70mm @ 24mm, f/2.8, 25 sec, ISO 2500, 08/13/13, 2:41 AM