Automagisk blog

After one of many heavy Christmas dinners I decided I needed to get outside and move around a little. It had snowed heavily for days, and was still snowing when I went out around midnight, all dressed up in Norrøna Lofoten and some big boots bought at Svalbard.

D300, 800 ISO, 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 23mm, f/2.8, 1/30s.

I was only out for about an hour, but quickly found that there are a lot of different temperatures on streetlights: yellowish, greenish, blueish and all sort of in-between stuff. I left the white balance on “auto” and decided to fix everything in Lightroom later.

After fiddling quite some time with images like this one, I decided black and white would be best. It was just too much work getting everything to look right, especially with different lights in the same photo.

D300, 800 ISO, 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17mm, f/16, 3s.

I couldn’t get the colors to look right and still keep the “snowy” atmosphere. I wanted the snow in the air to be clearly visible, which was difficult when I also wanted the colors to look right. The image above is a 3 second exposure, and this one is 1/13 second:

D300, 800 ISO, 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17mm, f/2.8, 1/13s.

Here is another long exposure (10 seconds), giving the pine tree on the left a little blur – but making the snow in the air invisible. This has both the greenish streetlights and the whiter (bluer) lights near the building on the left, making black and white an easy choice..

D300, 200 ISO, 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 32mm, f/13, 10s.

A short(ish) exposure showing some of the snow in front of the light, but still giving a sense of blur/movement:

D300, 200 ISO, 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 18mm, f/2.8, 1/4s.

Lightroom details

As mentioned, I left the white balance on auto, and converted to black and white. I started out with the very nice Ilford HP5 400 Lightroom preset from LifeInDigitalFilm, and adjusted a little bit extra for each image. The Ilford HP5 400 made the snow in the air clearly visible, and I think the contrast and tone curve worked well for these photos.

I wrote about Lightroom black and white presets before, and might as well paste in a little of it here:

PresetHeaven has an overview of 34 free black & white film presets for Lightroom (actually, it is 17 presets with and without auto tone).

All the presets are made by Michael W. Gray at LifeInDigitalFilm. These are the 17 films:

• Agfa Scala 200X
• Agfapan 100
• Agfapan 25
• Agfapan 400
• Fuji Acros 100
• Ilford Delta 100
• Ilford Delta 3200
• Ilford Delta 400 Pro
• Ilford Delta 400
• Ilford FP4 125
• Ilford HP5 400
• Ilford Pan F 50
• Ilford SFX 200
• Ilford XP2 Super 400
• Kodak TMAX 100
• Kodak TMAX 400
• Kodak Tri-X 400

I’m looking forward to Lightroom 3 and the “grain” effect, which I have tested a little bit in Using the Grain effect in Lightroom 3 RC1.

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