Nashville is the state capital of Tennessee and is mostly known for being the center of country and western music, but is also great for sports, arts and visiting museums. The city is situated next the the Cumberland River, a tributary to the Ohio River
The John Siegenthaler Pedestrian Bridge crosses the river and gives a great view of downtown Nashville.
Me and my wife went there to shoot the city skyline at sunset both from the bridge and on the river bank opposite to the downtown. It turned out that we were not completely satisfied after the first shoot, so we came back the following week.
Gear
The camera was a Nikon Z7 with the native 24-70/4 S lens and the Tamron 15-30/2.8 G2 with the FTZ adapter. Obviously we used tripods. No filters were used. Instead a number of images were taken and stacked together later in Photoshop.
To predict the time and where the sun sets, I use an app on my iPhone called TPE.
The shoot
We scouted the best location on the bridge and set up the camera on the tripod about 10 minutes before sunset. A few things to think about:
Turn off the vibration reduction when you are on a tripod. I cannot say that I have ever noticed any difference, but if the manufacturer recommends there must be a reason for it.
A remote control or to set the camera to a delay is great to avoid motion blur when you press the shutter button. I usually use a 2s delay, but in the case the tripod is standing on something that is not rigid or if the lens is large, I would use a longer delay, like 5s or 10s.
To achieve the optimum image quality, it is best to use the native ISO and an aperture which give you sufficient sharpness thru the image without losing overall acuity. The native ISO on Nikon Z7 is 64, which gives amazing low noise and one of the best dynamic ranges you can get.
Remember that the more you stop down your aperture the more diffraction and hence less sharpness. Choose your exposure time according the exposure you want to achieve. Do I need to say that all this is done in manual mode.
Lock the focus where you want the most detail. In this case, I focused on the closer building and after that I turned the autofocus off.
Never forget to improvise! On our first visit the sun showed up between a couple of buildings for a few seconds. I quickly removed the camera from the tripod and shot a few handheld images. I stopped the aperture down to get the beautiful sunstars.
Stacking images in post processing
Using filter or not to use filter is the question?
The Tamron 15-30/2.8 required special and very expensive filter systems and I never bothered with that, so in that case I have no choice but to stack images in post.
I usually shoot waterfalls at 1/8s to 1/2s and most of the time I can get away with 4-8 exposures to add up to that.
When the water is moving slower as in the Cumberland River or when you are shooting clouds, longer exposures are desired, sometimes longer than 10min. I probably prefer to add a 10 stop filter than doing 20 exposures of 30s each, but that is only for convenience.
End of the day, it does not matter which method you choose.
My workflow of stacking images is as follows:
I start editing in Lightroom, which I find to be great for adjusting the exposure, white balance and colors. I also do some lens corrections. I synchronise the adjustments to all the images. When I do stacking, I never crop or rotate in Lightroom.
Open all images as layers in Photoshop. I usually check the layers in Photoshop at 100%. If there are blurry layers, I discard them before proceeding. Thus, always shoot more frames than you think you will need.
Choose all layers in Photoshop and go to Edit -> Auto-Align Layers...
After that you can crop and rotate to improve on the composition.
The next step is to group the layers into a smart object. Layers -> Smart Objects -> Convert to Smart Object
After this you need to let Photoshop combine the images in the smart object to one long exposure. Layers -> Smart Objects -> Stack Mode -> Mean. Mean gives you the classical long exposure, but why not explore the other stack modes? I like Median, which gives an interesting "cut-up" look to clouds.
Then you just do the adjustments you would normally do.
Done!
