Night Photography in Gisburn Forest
Night Photography
...in Gisburn Forest
Eaten alive in a graveyard at midnight...
Last weekend I decided that I'd ignored my camera long enough and ventured forth into the darkness. The stars were out, the air was calm and warm and so I packed up my gear and took the half hour drive out into the countryside.
Stocks Reservoir and Gisburn Forest - Taken on the Mavic Pro
Gisburn Forest is a pretty fabulous place. Nestled on the edge of the Forest of Bowland area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the forest lies along the banks of Stocks Reservoir and is used as a fantastic nature reserve. It's an area that I've recently been visiting as regularly as possible, using my drone to create videos of the sweeping vistas and enclosed trails that criss-cross through the trees.
From my recent visits, I'd identified the secluded church that sits n the edge of the tree-line as a point of interest to photograph by starlight when I next got the chance, and so I found myself stood in the graveyard of a remote little church, being devoured by midges and whatever other insects had identified me as their evening meal.
Shooting for the stars...
Step 1 - Capture the Ambient Light before you lose all of the colour and details.
Summertime here is always a bit disappointing for shooting the stars, the ambient light never dips low enough to really reach Astronomical Twilight, so there's always a latent glow in the sky, and the best of the stars are hidden from view. That, combined with the ominous looking clouds developing behind me, somewhat forced the issue with regards to the photograph I was going to take. I decided on a very simple focus and time stacked shot of one of the gravestones in front of the little church beneath a starry twilight.
Just before the end of civil twilight, whilst there was still some vestiges of light and colour in the sky, I took a low ISO image, focusing on the gravestone in the foreground. The hope being that the last of the light would make the flowers hidden amongst the tall, dark grass standout a bit better and that the image would be less noisy when I came to put it together. I then beat a hasty retreat to the car to hide from the biting insects that had started to swarm, leaving the camera to fend for itself for a while.
You can see in the image here that the sky is blown out, because i've exposed for the gravestone and the rest of the foreground, and the temperature is something that I usually rely on correcting in post-processing. The benefit of shooting in RAW format is that you can always come back to the temperature later to adjust it without any loss of image quality.
Step 2 - Shoot the sky. You can see the cloud bank on the left letting me know that I'd run out of time...
Having let the cloud of midges die down a little, and let the sun finish setting to the best of its ability. I ventured back out a few times to take a few more shots. Waiting for it to get as dark as possible was offset by the encroaching cloud bank, so instead of waiting for a pure cloudless star filled sky, decided to just wait for a small cloud that was drifting across the scene to sit in a more aesthetically pleasing position above the church, and took a shot, exposing and focused for the sky alone.
To focus on the stars, I find it's easiest to throw the DSLR in to live-view and zoom in on the LCD to the brightest star I can see and manually focus until the star is at its sharpest. Then simply lock the lens into manual focus and shoot in mirror-up mode using the cameras in-built 5 second timer to minimise vibrations and keep the image as sharp as possible.
Here it comes to ruin my evening.
Just before I left the church, I thought I'd try to capture the clouds as a long exposure as they passed over the church. If there are clouds passing directly towards or away from the camera, you can use them to create a warp-like effect, leading directly towards your subject. I always like the type of photograph it produces, with the leading lines in the clouds giving a sense of time passing a static object by.
Dalehead Church - Nikon D750 - Nikkor 14-24 f/2.8 - 14mm 30sec ISO 800
Putting it all together.
To put my original image together, I took the foreground and background images into Adobe Photoshop and focus stacked them. This created two layers which could be manipulated independently of each other. This was important because I could more easily balance the images, adjusting their relative brightness' and their colour temperatures to look more in-keeping with one another. They were taken in different light conditions, meaning that applying sweeping changes to the image as a whole would have left it all looking very unnatural. The resultant image is one that I like, but it's not going to win any awards! Rather, it's a nice keepsake from a pleasant evening in this area of outstanding natural beauty.
