it's been a while since i blogged about a photo i've taken, but this seemed like the perfect opportunity to start back up...
as summer approaches in my neck of the woods my yard gets filled up with fireflies. The spectacle is kinda magical, and i wanted to try and capture that a bit for this photo.
So, I took 88 photos. which may seem like overkill to most of you, but here is why approached the shot this way.
I wanted to open up the aperture wide open (1.8) so I could capture as much of the flashes of light from the fireflies as possible. But with the aperture wide open I couldn't keep the exposure open very long without completely overexposing the shot. So to compensate for this issue, I took one base shot at 8 seconds f/1.8 (which is the picture that allows you to see the fence, tree, etc). next i took 87 shots at f/1.8 and 3 seconds... these are the shots that capture the fireflies.
I then imported the 88 shots into photoshop as a stack, and then set the stack mode to "Maximum". This would combine all the pictures by showing the brightest pixel available for that location in any of the 88 shots. And that is how I got the fireflies to show up.
The process takes a while (about 2 hours of processing tim on the mac), but at the end of the process, it worked out ok ;-)
Daaaang 2 hours. Well it seems like it was worth the effort, and great thinking!
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