The Making of a Composite Image

I wanted to write an article about the creation of the above image. Primary for information as to some of the processes that I, as a photographer, go through while also explaining my thought process when shooting images.

When shooting at night, you have certain challenges to overcome. As "photography" loosely translates as "drawing with light" the amount of light that hits the sensor, or film or any paper coated with a special chemical. As you can imagine, when the sun sets, there is limited light available. To compensate for this, the shutter on the camera has to be open for a lot longer then normal.

As an example, while shooting in a studio or in daylight, you would normally use a shutter speed of around 1/125th of a second. However, at night when there is less light, the shutter speed would have to be around 10 seconds. This allows more light to be recorded and compensates for the darkness of the night.

All composites' start with a base image, or a back plate, and this was the one I had chosen for this. Mainly because it was the first image I had taken that I had liked. My first problem was the light that was being emitted from the street lights, or should I say the temperature of the lights. Direct your eyes to the chevrons on the road in the front of the image, we all know that they are white, however in this unedited image they seemed to be tinged with a red.

And that was the first part of my process, to remove the colour cast from those lines so they could be white again. And after a few minor adjustments, I was happy with the result. Then I turned my attention to the second image I was wanting to add. As there was red tail light trails, I needed white ones to complete the image. Once I had that image loaded up into my editing software, and made the rquired adjustments, was able to combine both the images together.

With both images loaded into Photoshop, I began the process of combining them to make it look a seemless image. With one image stacked on top of the other image, I had to use a "mask" to hide and reveal the respective parts of each image. This was a just a case of hiding the left hand side of the white light image to be able to reveal the red lights from the image underneath.

And there you have it, a relative basic process that enabled me to create the image aboveHad I not taken my tripod with me on that trip, the image wouldn't have been possible due to the length of time I needed to have the shutter open for. By having the shutter open for 10 seconds I was able to haven image that wasn't shaky due to my tripod being stable.

I hope this article has given you an insight into the way I have created the image I have beenposting about for the last few days