Night Under African Skies

A distant lightning storm partially covers the starlit sky while I light painted the foreground with a hand torch.

Taken from Buffalo Springs Camp, just north of the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania.

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Edit 28th Jan 2010: Original image replaced with update.

I was never very happy with the original image, the foreground was too blown out and it wasn't as crisp as I'd have liked. I'd always planned to come back to this image and fix it. At first I figured to entirely replace the foreground with a shot taken just after it in the same sequence but I decided that capture was sufficiently different from this image to stand on it's own. Plus I've never been entirely comfortable with of the ethical validity of pick and mix landscape images. However in working on that other image I realised my digital darkroom skills and tools had advanced enough to maybe try going back and re-working this image on it's own. This new version was produced inside Lightroom 3 beta with the assistance of the Vivesa 2 plugin at no time di the image enter photoshop - so no layering, no cut and paste and definately no cloning other than the use of the spot repair tool inside Lightroom.