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I share in La Vanguardia Readers’ Photos this photographic trick to transform night into day. And I am going to illustrate it with four snapshots with which, accidentally, I discovered that a night photo can become daytime by exclusively manipulating the camera parameters.
No type of image manipulation software has been used, neither Photoshop, nor Corel Photo Paint, nor Gimp, nor anything similar.
Of course, it should be said that it is impossible to make a night photo look like it was taken during the day if the night lighting conditions are not appropriate.
I took the photographs on April 7, 2023 at the top of Coll del Moro (475 meters above sea level), on national highway 420. The first pair of photographs at 10:45 p.m. and the second pair at 23 hours 19 minutes.
It was therefore a dark night, with a clear and starry sky, without light pollution from nearby towns and with the moon as the only source of natural light.
The necessary equipment consists of a tripod (the camera must be immobilized), a camera that has a wide ISO sensitivity range, good megapixel resolution, that accepts long exposure times and good optics.
The camera used in the four photographs is the Nikon D810 and as optics in the first two photographs (A and B) a Nikon 18-35mm wide angle lens, and in the second two (B and C) a Nikon 28-300mm VR telephoto lens
The camera in question has a built-in GPS and stores in each photograph all the location data (UTC date and time, altitude, latitude, longitude and compass heading – that is, which direction the camera is pointing relative to north) provided by the satellite in case any reader wanted to go there and try to repeat achieving the same effect.
To obtain these photographs the camera must be programmed in manual mode. The following table shows the parameters of each photograph.
While photographs A and C show the real lighting (night, moonlight), the equivalents B and D appear to have been taken during the day.
It can be seen that the effect is basically achieved with a high sensitivity, a long exposure time (30 seconds), but no more because giving more time would capture the movement of the stars as a result of the rotation of the earth, and by manipulating the aperture of the diaphragm.
UTC time is the universal reference time for the entire earth indicated by the satellite. In Spain the time is UTC 1 (in winter time) and UTC 2 (in summer time).
In photos A and B you can clearly see the Orion constellation just above the tree at the end of the road. Also in photos C and D but in a different position because C and D were taken half an hour later.
The curious thing about the effect is that just by opening the diaphragm everything lights up, the moonlight looks like sunlight, the black night sky turns blue as if it were day, but the stars do not disappear but there are more. . A curious effect, how can you see the stars during the day? Well this way.
