Swan Lake

[Lesley Jones]

If you're reading this Hamish - I got lucky with the weather!

Taken on my non-working day yesterday. I've been wondering for ages what this little island would look like from the other side of the lake. I almost didn't find out as I had to flounder through well over half a mile of the most awful mud. At the first puddle I was able to creep around the side. The second one was trickier and I got covered. After that it was a case of wading through as best as possible while trying not to fall flat on my face. Closer to the island I had to push through a barrier of stinging nettles as the local fishermen clearly hadn't been here for a while. There was just enough space to set up the tripod and I waited for sunset. And then a little bit longer. Having got a shutter speed slow enough to blur the gentle ripples, I jokingly shouted at these two swans that they were messing up my photograph, so I decided to snap them instead. The stars were taken on a second exposure a bit later...

 

[Dave Green]

Oh aye - I like that!

 

[Lesley Jones]

Thank you! Actually... if anyone knows why I had so much trouble with the stars, I would be most grateful. I did my first long exposure star trails last year and at 30 minutes I was amazed at the lack of noise. (I used the noise reduction option in the menu). The wonderful image Chris put up the other day had the same settings I had read about to avoid trails and you wouldn't believe the noise it produced on the old Sony. The image is literally bright pink with it. I had to mess around and eventually used 15 seconds at ISO 200 and f5.6. I had the noise option on, then off and nothing seemed to work. These stars are real, but are the only things from the second exposure. The sky couldn't be used and I had to paint out the bits I didn't want

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Well, it looks beautiful, Lesley. Worth the effort.

 

[Chris Dodkin]

That's competition winning stuff Lesley - worth the effort, and nice job keeping the swans

 

[Pete Askew]

Beautifully done Lesley. Super composition and the swans really work well where they are. The stars are a nice touch too and worth persisting with.

These noise reduction algorithms do seem to produce some odd effects. The Leica applies a 'black noise' reduction that takes as long as the main exposure but does a pretty good job in most cases. I would guess that what you are seeing is related to the ratio of light to dark. In a longer exposure there are enough stars (though with movement) for the algorithm to identify those highlights from noise whereas in the shorter ones there isn't. Did you use a drastic levels adjustment to get the stars back that you did?

 

[Lesley Jones]

The Sony has that black noise reduction. When I did the 30 minute star trails, it took another 30 minutes to process in camera before I could see the image. For this one I just did white balance on a star in RAW and pushed the sky to black. I'm no Photoshop wizard and I couldn't work out how to do it properly, so I painted over the top quarter of a duplicate image and painted the sky back, leaving just the stars to merge down. I know there's a fancy way to remove scratches and drying marks on scanned film. Something like blur one layer until the worst scratch goes and then paint over with a big brush set to... is it lighten? Only pixels that are lighter in the original image (the scratches) are altered. I haven't got around to trying it yet...

 

[Glenn Clabo]

Wonderful shot Lesley. An all around beautiful job.
It made me remember...I was at a local pond here a couple of years ago that has a swan couple. I was talking to a bird watcher about them and he explained to me that swans mate for life...and when one dies the other will die of a broken heart. Both sad and wonderful at the same time.

 

[Dan Cattermole]

Very nice Lesley. Nice colours.

 

[Julian de'Courcy]

A bit of brilliance. always admire your exploits and the endeavours and difficulties you confront to capture the picture.

 

[Brian Moore]

Fantastic image, Lesley. (Thanks for wading through the muck for us!)

 

[Beth Anthony]

very nice. the stars and the swans together are pretty unique.