New York in Vegas

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Tech Info: Single exposure taken with Nikon D90 using 18-105 @40mm, 5 sec at f/8 with ISO 160

This is a shot of the New York imitation found at the starting of the strip in Las Vegas. There were too many people moving and hence I had to compose the scene in such a way that there were no people in the shot. Couple of people did screw a shot as they came right in front of the lens and stood still for almost 5 seconds. So it took some time to make sure I got it right. While I was trying this, wife was busy looking at handsome hunks and Nidhi was happily dozing in the stroller

How was this shot processed? I usually use curves to get some contrast in the images, but this one had all pixel values in the entire luminosity range. So couldn’t use curves to compress the range anymore. The next option was to use levels. Also since the scene contains lots of lights, they pretty much tend to get blown out. While taking the shot, I had made sure that the amount of highlights that got blown out was almost nil. In post, all I had to use was a little bit of dodging and burning to recover details from those highlights and shadow areas and use layer masking to blend them together. After that it was the usual border and watermarking the image.

I’m in love with the blue hour shots and for some reason I just love long exposures during that time. I’ve way too many shots in the archives and hopefully someday I’ll get to process them. For now this one was done to take a break from my Yosemite series 🙂