Early Wake up Call!

[ShaneS]

Thank you again everyone! Your encouragement in very heartwarming

Colin I have one more question...how do you accomplish this in post?

Also - if you want longer and you don't have an ND filter handy - then just keep shooting whatever you're shooting and combine them when you get back home; 8x 30 second shots will look the same at 1x 4 minute shot.

I'm guessing that you are using layers and some combination of masking and then assigning percentages to each layer that total 100%? So with 8 images the base layer (with the best sky) would the be set to 100% opacity and then then remaining 7 would be at somewhere around what percent with the sky masked out? I have read about this in the past but it has never really clicked.

BTW I have dedicated photo pants as well and I usually have a bit of a sand pit in my car despite toweling off before getting in. In fact on this morning I think that my pants were wet up to the knee and my butt was also wet due to the sitting and waiting beside the tripod. Not to mention that I kept losing things in the dark. Wait, where is the lens cap, the remote, how about the flashlight? They kept falling into little the crevices of my back pack

I think that I have some more work to do in terms of finding a good composition for this type of shot.

[Colin Southern]

Colin I have one more question...how do you accomplish this in post?

I'm guessing that you are using layers and some combination of masking and then assigning percentages to each layer that total 100%? So with 8 images the base layer (with the best sky) would the be set to 100% opacity and then then remaining 7 would be at somewhere around what percent with the sky masked out? I have read about this in the past but it has never really clicked.

Gawd no - that's sounds like a lot of hard work!

Just click on FILES -> SCRIPTS -> LOAD FILES INTO STACK, and then change the layer opacity to 100 divided by the layer position from the bottom (so bottom layer is 100%, 2nd layer up is 50%, 3rd layer up is 33%, 4th layer up is 25% etc) and "job done".

Too easy eh? No masking required - you're doing a frame average - not an HDR composite.

[ShaneS]

Of course there was an easy way to do this. I just tried with three shots and I get it, I get it!

Thank you once again Colin

[Donald]

And the beauty of that, Shane, is that you can adjust to taste, as Colin has written elsewhere (or maybe in this thread as well). Stack, say, six images and think, 'Nah, that's a bit too much'. Answer - Knock out layers, say 5 and 6 and see what it looks like with 4 layers.

If you do a search you find sites that explain the formula and provide percentage tables down (or should that be up) to about 20 layers.

[Colin Southern]

If you do a search you find sites that explain the formula and provide percentage tables down (or should that be up) to about 20 layers.

To be honest, once I get past about 5 layers I start to worry if the layers are getting the right proportions (you start needing fractions of a percent opacity) (16.67 etc). Easy work-around though - just just a few images for 1 composite - then a few others for a 2nd composite - then just combine the 2 (or more) composites in exactly the same way. I've done up to about 64 - and one has to be quite methodical about it - but it works just fine.