Avenue of the Fountains – Holiday Lights

The Christmas / Holiday lights are up now on the Avenue of the Fountains.

The photo below is a quick edit of a photo that I took at a high ISO.  I used ISO 100 to 400 for the rest of them.  I only bumped the ISO up above 100 when I couldn’t get my exposures within the 30 second limit.  (I didn’t want to go to bulb mode.)

I’m holding up an 18% gray card so that I’d have something of a clue about how to set the color temperature while developing the images.  This is a quick edit in Lightroom.  Note that although the white balance is correct for me and perhaps some of the immediate foreground, it’s definitely not correct for the storefronts.  This is a problem with such scenes; there are a bunch of different light sources with different color temperatures.

I used the this color temperature found in this photo as starting point for several others.  I wasn’t happy with it, however, for some of the later ones that I developed.  (The order that I present them here are the order in which they were shot, not developed.)  For some of the images, I processed some of the layers twice with a different color temperature (and tint). I combined them after the fact to try to get the white balance correct (or at least not wildly incorrect) for various parts of the scene.  The photo above is a good example; I used one color temperature for the store front and another for most of the rest of the scene.