Some shots take a lot more work than I expect. The Boston Light and Graves Light image was the third attempt at the picture. The first time the atmosphere was too dense (hazy). The second time the wind caused too much camera shake in the long exposure. The third time was the charm. My good friend Bill Shields and I set out for the base of Fort Revere in Hull before sunset. The air was clear and crisp with no wind. Boston Light is probably a mile from the fort, and Graves Light maybe a mile beyond that. To compress the two lights into one frame, have good focus on both lights (depth of field) and get them flashing together required a long lens and a long exposure.
I chose a Canon 1D MkIIn, which has an 8.3-megapixel processor. I selected a 300mm 2.8 telephoto coupled to a 1.4 converter. With the cameras 1.3 crop factor of the camera plus the 1.4 teleconverter on the 300, that makes a 546mm lens. I could have gone longer (maybe next time) To get the lights shining and depth of field I needed a long exposure- I though about 15 seconds would do it. The lights only shine together once every 30 seconds or so.
To keep noise (grain, fuzz) to a minimum I wanted to shoot at ISO 200. As the light faded I ended up with ISO 400. Shooting in RAW I had lots of chances later to correct any flaws in Photoshop. (RAW is an uncompressed file type; JPEG compresses the image by stripping off some data) For color balance I selected (automatic) which was a guess since the image mixes daylight with incandescent.
I mounted the rig on a heavy tripod and got out the cable release. Bill and I made a number of test shots to start dialing in on what we wanted. Bill was using a similar camera set up with a Mk III camera. The first shots looked OK but warm (yellow cast). As the sky started to get darker we started to get a colder (blue) sky.
 
 
One problem we found was that as the lens on Boston rotated it shone directly into the camera lens creating a very bad flair. Ok how can we get a shot without the light shining in the lens when that is what we kind of wanted? I had an idea that the flair was only from the instant the lighthouses lens was pointed directly at my lens. The solution was to stop the recording of the exposure during that brief time. I took a small dark seat pad from my trunk which is use to sit on hard surfaces. As the light rotated past my lens I covered the camera lens with the pad. This allowed me to get the lens shining, but no flair. Now I had to increase the length of exposure since I was cutting some time off with the use of the black shade. I ended up with a 30 second exposure.
After maybe 15 frames it looked as though we has some keepers. The darker it got, the less I liked the sky too, so we packed up the gear and headed for the computers to process the image. Raw images don’t open in my editing software so I had to open each image in Photoshop one at a time. Some of the images had camera shake (motion) just from tripping the shutter (next time I’ll try mirror lock up) some were out of focus and some were not properly exposed. I picked one frame and started tuning. The color is almost right from the camera. I did have a few CCD dust specs, which I cloned out, added smart sharpen and dodged a few spots on the outbuildings of Boston Light. The red streak is a boat traveling into the harbor; the red is it’s portside running light.
I like the results, but want to try the shot once more; maybe a little longer lens and mirror lock-up to dampen any camera shake. Bill wants to try using a 600mm lens for his shot.