A little while ago, Angel Island, an island in the middle of the San Francisco bay, caught fire. It started at about 9:30 and burned through the next day. I found out about it around 11pm, and it seemed like a great opportunity to go shoot something unusual! Shooting-wise, there were a few challenges, but I knew I could use Aperture to get the result I wanted. Specifically, I knew that noise could be a factor with higher ISOs, and I wanted to pick an exposure that would provide a good balance between providing detail and color in the fire plus detail in the rest of the scene.

Initially, I decided to shoot at ISO 200 on my 1Ds MkIII to minimize the noise. I was a little worried that the long exposure would cause the smoke from the fire to be really dispersed, but I figured that it was burning intensely enough that it wouldn't be an issue and could potentially give me a really big, glowing cloud in the image.

I decided that I wanted to end up with an image compensated down about 2/3 - 1 stop, but I instead dialed -1/3 stop into my camera. By shooting lighter, I knew that I would dial negative exposure compensation into Aperture and that would hopefully crush any noise in the dark areas. Plus, I figured that the bright white areas would burn out roughly the same amount unless I went down to at least -2.

Once I downloaded my card to Aperture, I picked the before image you see on the right. This shot was sharp, had a nice composition on the fire and smoke, and I like how the Berkeley Marina provided some perspective to the image. The shot was a little murky from all the smoke in the air, and the first thing I did was to figure out the exposure and black level that I wanted. I went with my initial thought about the exposure and dialed in -.4 stops, and then I slid the Black Point slider around until I found a value (7.47 if you care) that made the sky dark but not black. I then played around with the exposure slider, but found that my initial instinct was pretty good.

Next, I wanted to saturate the oranges and reds just a tad more. Because those colors are similar to skin tones, Vibrancy wouldn't have much effect. I clicked the right arrow on the saturation slider once, and found that a 1.1 value was too saturated and looked unnatural. I double-clicked on the field instead and entered a value of 1.04 (I wanted a tad less than half the effect 1.1 gave me), and that gave me the look I wanted. If I had really wanted to be precise about only saturating the reds and oranges, I could have used the color block and tweaked individual colors, but I was satisfied with saturating the overall image just a tad more.

Now that I had the look I wanted, I straightened my image and cropped it slightly (if I was going to crop a lot off, I would've done this step first). The last remaining challenge was the streak of lights from one of the helicopters circling the area. In Aperture 1.X, I would've gone into Photoshop at this point, but the Retouch brush in Aperture 2 is good enough that I didn't need Photoshop here. I zoomed in, and set the Retouch brush to automatically choose its source. With two large brush strokes, I had painted over the lights, and Aperture cleanly removed them.

With 5 minutes of work, I ended up with the after image you see here. I'm definitely happy with it!