Adventureland Tiki Statues & the Moon

Unbelievable, after all the photos I’ve posted, this is only my second shot of the Adventureland Tiki Statues. The first one was pretty lackluster as well at least to my current standard. Let’s jump right into the technical details on this one.

Shooting & Editing Adventureland Tiki Statues

Now with this photo the area appears very lit however that could not be further from the actuality. This area is incredibly low lit at night, even with the moon I had trouble even framing through the viewfinder and resorted to using live view to frame the shot which I don’t really like for my own quirky reasons. Additionally, even with the Nikon 14-24 2.8 I was not able to capture all of the tiki statues and the moon high above the trees. Of course I couldn’t have that so I shot a vertical panorama of sorts which presented quite a challenge in post as I didn’t really do it like I should have when shooting. I had to do quite a bit of manual manipulation to get everything looking just right on the stitching but it was ultimately worth it as I just couldn’t resign myself to not have the moon in this shot of the tiki statues. The sky just adds so much to this shot in my opinion. I don’t care to admit just how much time I spent on the stitch work but once this was done the post processing was pretty quick and easy. I did a bit of debris cleanup with the healing brush and then used Nik Color Efex Pro Contrast to dial my contrast up a bit. I did some additional levels adjustments along with color balancing and some manual dodging and burning. Finally some saturation and vibrance adjustments along with sharpening and the final result is something I’m quite pleased with.