Winter nights - full manual

Lammaslampi night, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today at night I suddenly got an idea to go out and try to take some photos of the stars. But then it turned out that clouds were covering most of the sky, so I decided to try something else. I went to the nearby lake, which had gotten the first ice cover today.

It was a good silent night for doing winter landscape photography. I took a couple of dozen long exposures at ISO 100 with the LX3. I used manual focusing and manual exposure, and after some trying ended up with 13 second exposure at f/2.0 for most of the photos.

This photo was stitched from two separate photos, which I didn't originally intend to combine. But the PTGui panorama software turned out useful once again. The sign in the photo warns of the weak ice.

Later at the post-processing stage I experimented with some of the other photos using the Lightzone software. I ended up using the "Bright scene" operation, trying to open up the shadowed parts of the night landscape photos. I'm not quite sure if the results were good, but it was nice to experiment.