this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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Photography

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I need to tell you about the absolute brutal shit I went to get through to get this picture.

Four exposures, stacked and bracketed at -2, -1, 0, and +1. Doing an exposure at 2 would have made me bring out the bulb and since I don't have a remote shutter, I gotta do it with my phone, and I wouldn't wish CanonConnect on Stephen Miller. So that said, I stood there at Kerry Park in Seattle, amongst seventy or a hundred other people, and they were all trying to capture this with their terrible little phone sensors, and I had my actual real shit, I was the only one with an actual camera.

So I took my exposures and some extra ones on the side, came back home to Portland, and set to work. My +1 was slightly off, just a little windblown. Darktable doesn't give a shit, it's not aligning nothing. I had Hugin stack up my control points and try to align it, told me it was a success, but every last point of light looked like AI circa '22, so that was a no-go.

In the end, I just edited the 0 exposure and just went with that. Dammit.

Thanks for seeing my frustrating work.

Oh also @nothingcorporate@lemmy.today, eat your heart out, here's a space needle.

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[–] hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Thanks for the reminder to buy a cable release. I want to try nightime pictures like this.

[–] tanisnikana@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

My sister joked, on the trip home yesterday, that the purpose of my life was to serve as a warning to others. :D

[–] hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Warning? No. Inspiration. The picture looks great even without exposure stacking, which is how I would take this myself. I've never done exposure stacking, and if there's a way to do it in a darkroom, I'm not ready for that just yet.

[–] tanisnikana@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

Thank you so much! :D