Deep in The Heart of Flagstaff, Part 1. This image is from a recent photo walk organized by Bill Waters under the auspices of the Sedona Camera Club (and much appreciated!). It’s a photo of a café across the street from Motel DuBeau, whose giant elevated sign is a FLG landmark visible from any direction. It was originally erected to attract travelers during the heyday of Route 66, which is just across the railroad tracks from this spot.

After the photo walk ended, I hung around to capture this scene long after sunset when the sky was almost – but not quite completely – dark and a crescent moon was loitering above the sign. My new camera, collaborating with our resident artistic digital elves (see below), had to work pretty hard to create this image.

Tech info: Nikon Z 8 camera with Nikon 28-300mm lens at 50mm, 1/25 sec. at f/5.0, ISO 16,000 (no, that’s not a typo!)

Image ©2023 James D. Peterson

Technical notes, for those who might be interested: This image captures a nighttime scene with a huge dynamic range (the range between the darkest and brightest light levels), and it pushed the limits of current imaging technology to create it. Everything in the image except the moon was (impressively) captured by my camera in a single shot. But the moon was far brighter than anything else and was massively overexposed, so I had to capture it separately. The exposure for the moon was 1/200 sec. at f/8, ISO 250. Both images were captured handheld.

At ISO 16,000, the image of the scene had a large amount of digital noise obscuring much of the detail, especially in the sign tower. I used Adobe’s recently introduced, AI-based Denoise tool to remove this and recover the detail. It processed for over ½ hour and did a stellar job – much better than other tools sold by DxO and Topaz Photo Labs in this case, though I’ve found both of those other tools to be much better under different circumstances. I then used Topaz PhotoAI to sharpen the image (works