Very nice. Now I must investigate composites to understand what you're talking about, particular with respect to "composite from a single RAW file". Now that I have some vague ideas about doing night photography I need to get out and do some more. Also I just heard about a 32-bit compact flash card reader as opposed to a normal 16-bit and must go out and look for them since they're supposed to be much faster for download. A full 2GB card takes a while to download and one would rather not ponder upon how long a 4GB or larger would take.

(Reply) (Thread)

Thanks! Here's the tutorial I used:

http://luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml

(Luminous Landscape has LOTS of good tutorials.)

It was pretty simple once I got the hang of it. I chose one exposure for the highlights and one for the shadow details. I used the simplest method they recommend, "The Layer Mask."

For the composite from a single RAW file, ...well, for one thing, I shoot in RAW and then convert to PSD, which I recommend if you don't already. Anyway, for the single RAW composite, I converted the file once paying attention to shadows, and the second time paying attention to highlights. Then I composited them using the same method as in the tutorial above.

A good solid tripod is essential to night photography. All of my exposures are at least a couple seconds long, and once I get a cable release for the film camera, I'll be going for minutes-long exposures when I can.

As far as cards, I have two one Gb cards. For my D70, that gives me more than 350 exposures in RAW. Better than one larger card is two smaller cards and a portable hard drive (I have a Jobo PhotoMobil) that you can copy one card onto while shooting with the other.

As for what to do while downloads or other long processes are happening, I recommend Text Twist. Kidding.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Thanks for all the info. I have PhotoShop Elements but not PhotoShop CS2. I'm very tempted to get CS2 but am still thinking about the price of CS2. I have Paint Shop Pro but am a bit perturbed since they don't read D200 NEF Raw format. I have Nikon Capture 4.4 (I think that's the version) and plan to get NX so I can read it in with no problem. Pondering, pondering. Anyway, I'll check out the Luminous Landscape site and digital blending. I have and use a tripod. That's what I used for the fireworks shots. I'm also contemplating changing the head. I've got a 3-way head but a ball head is becoming more enticing. I've got a shutter release cable, also used it for fireworks shots. Tripod and cable release also used for all my flower/plant macro shots. I only get around 120 shots in uncompressed RAW on the Nikon D200 (10.2 MP) on a 2GB card. Ah, will also look into portable hard drives. I can actually use my ipod for that too although it is rather full of music at the moment (I have the 60GB and I often wonder how people can deal with the ipod mini or shuffle both of which have 10GB down to 1GB - ah, just saw there's an 80GB ipod available. I think my cd collection could probably fill somewhere between 500GB to 1 Terabyte if I converted it all to mp3, depending upon the sampling rate, and my downloaded mp3 collection keeps growing, binary newsgroups are such fun). Text Twist? I'm looking at the Lexar Professional Firewire CF Reader. Don't have a laptop but if I did would look at the 32 bit CF card reader adapter. I keep thinking it would be fun to retire but how I can I do that with so many toys out there.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Does the first pic show how trucks reproduce?

(Reply) (Thread)

Arrr, arrr, arrr.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)