Aamir Zakaria Photography

Happy New Year

Mon­u­ment Cir­cle, Indi­anapo­lis, Indi­ana.   6 sec, f/9, ISO 100.

Hand­held long expo­sure, tech­nique inspired by Seth Dick­er­man.

How I did this:

To take the orig­i­nal shot, I opened the shut­ter for 6 sec­onds mov­ing my hands ever so light­ly to cre­ate some move­ment.  This was­n’t too dif­fi­cult, since it was freez­ing cold.  This pro­duced this original:

The white bal­ance is all funky from all the col­ored lights, so I adjust­ed it.

There’s some flare from all the lights which I treat­ed in Light­room with grad­u­at­ed fil­ters com­ing in diag­o­nal­ly from the right and the left.

Since I was too busy scarf­ing down free food dur­ing “man­ager’s hour” at my hotel, I missed the “blue hour”.   I don’t like the black sky, so I looked for a dark blue dusky sky in my library and came up with this:

This is tak­en from San Fran­cis­co, so I elim­i­nat­ed all evi­dence by insert­ing a grad­u­at­ed neu­tral den­si­ty fil­ter from below in Light­room giv­ing me this:

I super­im­posed these two lay­ers in Pho­to­shop to give me the final image.