While the title of this shot, A Universe of Energy, may seem to refer simply to the name of the pavilion it seemed the perfect title once I saw just how many stars I had captured in the sky for this shot. It is truly amazing to think how much energy is on display just in this small portion of the sky I captured. And that is with the light pollution hiding countless other visible stars. I remember hearing about a brief power outage at Disney a year or two back. I remember just how much of the starry sky was visible in that brief moment.
Shooting & Editing A Universe of Energy
This was shot with the Nikon D810 and Nikon 14-24 2.8. It was a typical 5 shot bracket at 2, 4, 8, 15 and 30 seconds. This shot had quite an ugly yellowish color cast. I did my standard color balance first on the sky and then separately on the foreground but then used a selective color adjustment layer to really fine-tune some of the colors. Now, this isn’t an adjustment I do on every shot but when you really need to fine-tune colors its absolutely phenomenal as you can target adjustments red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta separately. It also lets you make adjustments independently just to the white, neutral and black regions though I typically stay away from these. I especially love using this to help with problematic yellow and red color casts as you can quickly remove them without disturbing your other colors. I did a bit of dodging and burning to bring focus to the Universe of Energy sign and then finished it off with sharpening as well as my signature technique to help the stars pop. For me there’s nothing better than when I can capture a beautiful star filled sky to finish off my Disney World shots.
