The normal night lighting for the Eiffel Tower up until midnight is pretty nice, but every hour on the hour after dark it is additionally lit up like a kind of LED firecracker. I have mixed feelings about this light show—it is a bit vulgar, but then Paris is famously the City of Light.

Issues of taste—or lack thereof—aside, the extraordinary light display does present an exposure conundrum for two reasons: the lights on the Eiffel Tower are much brighter than the lights of the surrounding cityscape, and also the LED lights are in constant motion, like a giant sparkler, so one needs a fast shutter speed to freeze things in place.

I was lucky that I was in the middle of an extended bracketing exposure sequence when the light show went off at 10PM from the roof of the Tour Montparnasse. Combining the exposures as an HDR sequence led to decent results, but I still had to work in post-production to treat the resulting image with finesse and creativity.

Speaking of the craft of night photography post-production, you may be interested in the video recording of my recent Creative Night Photography Post-Processing webinar. Thanks to Star Circle Academy,  this video presentation is now available for download. The cost is $19, but readers of my blog have a (limited time) $5 discount. Click here for more information about the video, and here to purchase the video. Use the coupon code 5$harold (case sensitive) at checkout to get your discount.

Here’s the video description: Creative Night Photo Post Processing with Harold Davis Video: 1 hour, 15 minutes. Harold Davis, author, professional photographer, and workshop leader presents his approach to Post Processing Night Photos.

This video includes detailed discussions of:

• Stacking using the statistics capabilities of Photoshop Extended;
• An explanation of gamuts and color space – and why you do not want to work in sRGB (default space)—how to tweak your workflow to keep as wide a gamut of colors as possible
• Creative sharpening of night images using LAB color
• A look at a workflow to make an East River night scene in New York City stand out by applying multi-RAW processing, and a handful of filters and special effects.
• Please bear in mind that this is not a video recording with Hollywood production standards. But, as one webinar participant put it, “There is information about processing night photos in this video you can’t get anywhere else!”

Click here to learn more about the Creative Night Photography Post-Processing Video with Harold Davis video, and here to purchase the Creative Night Photography Post-Processing Video with Harold Davis video. Don’t forget to use the coupon code 5$harold (case sensitive) to get your discount!

Also please bear in mind the 30% pre-publication discount from my publisher for my new book, The Way of the Digital Photographer. My new book has quite a bit of detailed information about working with layers, creative post-production, and how post-production possibilities should inform your choices at the moment of exposure.

Use the discount code PP-DAVIS30 (case sensitive) at checkout to get your discount. Click here for more information and to buy The Way of the Digital Photographer.