City of Stars

This is a photo I've been envisaging for quite some time, and last night I finally took the opportunity to give it a crack.

This is not a composite. It is a blend of 190 exposures at 30 seconds each for a total exposure time of 95 minutes.

To capture this image, I reversed my NiSi Graduated Neutral Density 16 filter (4 stop) so the glare of the city lights were cut back to allow me to capture the stars above.

From an editing point of view, I loaded them all up in Adobe Photoshop and layered them on top of each other, doing some very minor edits (to remove brake lights and reflections), then did some final tweaking in Adobe Lightroom.

The details for this image are:

• Nikon D750 with Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 G2
• NiSi GND16
• Sirui W-1204 tripd with K-20x Ball Head
• f/7.1
• 95 minutes
• ISO400