The Making Of Bridge Underneath

This time I'm going to share about thought process and light-painting workflow on another image of mine - Bridge Underneath.

The location - my home town bay area which is surrounded by tungsten street light. The ambient light is quite strong here and my camera setting is aperture at F8, 30 seconds shutter speed, ISO 100 and auto white balance, I'm always happy as long as I don't need to wait more than 30 seconds to review my first image. My main subject here is those wood sticks, and the overhead bridge is considered the backdrop.

Exposure: Aperture F8|Shutter Speed 30s|ISO 100

Couple of things need to think about after reviewing first image, the auto white balance setting is smart, it sets the camera white balance to tungsten because you can see the colours shift to blue(to cancel out the orange so the colour looks more balance and natural), that's the white balance correction you get in-camera. Exposure wise, it seems to be underexposed and I need to pump up the exposure. But wait, I don't really care about "Correct" but more on getting "Creative" exposure, therefore I'm going to change the white balance to cloudy here to amplify the orange colour background light and keep the exposure(Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO) setting the same as first image. Most people never thought that changing white balance will increase your exposure especially when you change from cool white balance to warm white balance.

Exposure: Aperture F8|Shutter Speed 30s|ISO 100

Second image looks brighter than the first image even though I don't change exposure setting, it's not the exposure I want yet but close, the cloudy white balance changes the whole scene to orang colour. My main subject is those wood sticks, to make them pop, I play with "colour contrast" concept of which I will paint them with cool colour(blue here) against the warm colour(orange) backdrop. For the background ambient, I will add 1/3 stop of light so the setting I'm going for is aperture at F8, 40 seconds shutter speed and ISO 100. Light-painting wise, I'm going to paint the wood sticks from camera left(just out side of camera view), then get low to illuminate those woods, and just skim a little bit by standing up so that the woods on top will be painted as well.

Exposure: Aperture F8|Shutter Speed 40s|ISO 100

After 3 tries of light-painting, finally I have gotten everything right and here's the final result, the wood sticks colour becomes purple instead of blue(red orange+blue=purple), the background is little bit brighter and more glowing compared to second image. Post-processing wise I adjust the contrast a little bit and done.

Make up your mind of what you want to create, it will determine how the final image looks like.