E G O S P E W

Nightlight Unretouched, originally uploaded by LlewellynL.

Remember reciprocity failure? Sometimes you just don’t need Photoshop.

This is an actual unretouched photo of some unretouched structures in my nightly meanderings (Feb 7, 2009 ~8:30 PM).  No super-saturation or false-color IR.  All I added was my name and copyright.  How fair is that?

<nerdtext>
All the color here comes from the various monochromatic artificial light sources and of course the wonderful hues you can coax from the evening sky with a 4-second exposure.

I used to love to shoot out the apartment window in the middle of the night and let my Nikkormat EL stretch towards 60 seconds with slide film to get the ‘real’ colors from the Upper West Side tenements, topped by urban nimbus streaks. Besides the amplified subtleties the results incorporated the non-linear sensitivities of the different color layers when exposed outside the roughly 1 to 1/1000 second range they were calibrated for, hence reciprocity failure.

Another note about this image is the lens: the little Nikkor 50mm 1.8 (effective 75mm in DX). The VR zooms are pretty amazing but if I want the sharpest of the sharp, I snap on this baby (and lock my vision into medium-telephoto for better or worse). It provides that extra kick I look for in the detail and undoubtedly adds to the overall subliminal effect on the viewer. (It makes me kinda yearn for one of the Micro Nikkors, except they are all longer and slower and bigger and cost 20 times as much.)
</nerdtext>