The Andy Aupperlee Explosion 5000

On Wednesday Jon and I made a quick stop to the north shore of Portage Bay on our way to trivia night at Montlake Ale House. We were supposed to meet Sharat and Dana at 8:30, but I lost track of time and we showed up late, completely missing trivia (which is a shame considering the trivia talent residing at 4411). We’ll be there next week—promise.

These shots were made looking west towards I-5 and the University Bridge. Near the University police station and Auga Verde are a series of new floating docks. I wandered out there with my camera and tripod half expecting someone to chase me down and kick me off the docks. To my surprise, nobody seemed to mind that I was out there. I took pictures for a good hour while Jon made a phone call (and walked around the docks too).

For the shot above, I set the camera to Shutter Priority and made a 20 second exposure. I set ISO at 400 and the camera chose f/9. The D300 colors were cranked too. The floating docks were a little strange for long exposures. While the shutter was open I could feel the dock rising and falling in the water. To correct for this, I left the lens VR switched on. I’m not sure if this helped, but the picture did come out surprisingly sharp given the motion.

The image below is a zoomed in shot of the I-5 bridge about 30 minutes after sunset. Several minutes later the after-glow of sunset vanished and the crescent moon (visible in the shot above) came out. The thin cloud cover acted as a filter and prevented the moon from being too over exposed. I adjusted the levels on both shots in Adobe Photoshop CS2 using Curves (using a technique I learned from Scott Kelby). Although Noise Ninja excels at cleaning up noise from high ISO images, I created an extra layer and ran it on both images here. It seemed to smooth things out so I kept it.