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Description
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Obviously same subject as The Last Heir , just a different composition and some time later (what was it, about 1 hour and something more after sunset). In this case I wish I had the Tokina to experiment different angles and compositions as well.

To give away some details, the place got really dark, but we were still shooting happily. I used the GND8 and the sunset filter here, because I wanted to have punchy colors in the sky even though the sun got down. Since the meter stated that three stops of compensation were a bit too much (and I didn't have a gradual ND4), I slided the filter a bit towards the top and used an high contrast response curve on the camera. The saturation was kept high. I had some troubles judging the correct exposure (and somehow I failed). When I have to deal with long exposures I often switch to higher sensibilities until the meter suggests a shutter speed faster than 30s, and then do the math to go back to iso 100 or 200. This scene was quite dark indeed: I found out that with f13 at iso 1600 I was having the correct exposure with a shutter speed of 30s. I wanted the best sharpness and dof, so my aperture value had to be about f13 and my sensitivity about 200 iso (I couldn't wait too much to take the shot, the light was quickly fading to black). Now the math: 30s x 2^(3 stops from 1600 to 200 iso) = 240 s. The correct exposure should have been 240s at iso 200. My error was not considering that the meter tends to underexpose in very dark scenes (and also that the light was fading as the seconds passed), so I should have added at least 1 stop to the calculus (that would have meant about 500s). I used the remote cable and a cronometer to take the bulb shot.

On postwork, I'm trying out a "new" software (new to me at least! ): DxO Optics Pro 4. There is a fifth edition close to release, but I must say I was pretty impressed and satisfied with this fourth version as well. One outstanding thing is that it applies quite a bunch of automatic corrections on photos based on the known characteristics of the lens mounted on the camera body. As I expected, the software suggested to brighten the picture of about 1 stop, and so I did: it was like shooting iso 400. I cleared some dust spots and a bunch of hot pixels, adjusted curves and cleaned dark shadows from noise with the Neat Image plugin in Photoshop CS2.

[NFO:]
Camera: Nikon D80
Lens: Nikkor 18-70 DX
Filters: P.121S + P.197
Focal Length: 18 mm
Aperture: F/13
Shutter Speed: 247.8 s
ISO speed: 200

[PSTWRK:] RAW processed in DxO Optics Pro, fine tuning in Adobe Photoshop CS2

Description
-[]-[]-----------------------------------------------------------------
Obviously same subject as The Last Heir , just a different composition and some time later (what was it, about 1 hour and something more after sunset). In this case I wish I had the Tokina to experiment different angles and compositions as well.

To give away some details, the place got really dark, but we were still shooting happily. I used the GND8 and the sunset filter here, because I wanted to have punchy colors in the sky even though the sun got down. Since the meter stated that three stops of compensation were a bit too much (and I didn't have a gradual ND4), I slided the filter a bit towards the top and used an high contrast response curve on the camera. The saturation was kept high. I had some troubles judging the correct exposure (and somehow I failed). When I have to deal with long exposures I often switch to higher sensibilities until the meter suggests a shutter speed faster than 30s, and then do the math to go back to iso 100 or 200. This scene was quite dark indeed: I found out that with f13 at iso 1600 I was having the correct exposure with a shutter speed of 30s. I wanted the best sharpness and dof, so my aperture value had to be about f13 and my sensitivity about 200 iso (I couldn't wait too much to take the shot, the light was quickly fading to black). Now the math: 30s x 2^(3 stops from 1600 to 200 iso) = 240 s. The correct exposure should have been 240s at iso 200. My error was not considering that the meter tends to underexpose in very dark scenes (and also that the light was fading as the seconds passed), so I should have added at least 1 stop to the calculus (that would have meant about 500s). I used the remote cable and a cronometer to take the bulb shot.

On postwork, I'm trying out a "new" software (new to me at least! ): DxO Optics Pro 4. There is a fifth edition close to release, but I must say I was pretty impressed and satisfied with this fourth version as well. One outstanding thing is that it applies quite a bunch of automatic corrections on photos based on the known characteristics of the lens mounted on the camera body. As I expected, the software suggested to brighten the picture of about 1 stop, and so I did: it was like shooting iso 400. I cleared some dust spots and a bunch of hot pixels, adjusted curves and cleaned dark shadows from noise with the Neat Image plugin in Photoshop CS2.

[NFO:]
Camera: Nikon D80
Lens: Nikkor 18-70 DX
Filters: P.121S + P.197
Focal Length: 18 mm
Aperture: F/13
Shutter Speed: 247.8 s
ISO speed: 200

[PSTWRK:] RAW processed in DxO Optics Pro, fine tuning in Adobe Photoshop CS2