“When I made this picture, there was a strange nocturnal bird who found me pretty interesting and accompanied me through the process, almost to the point where I had a “Twilight Zone” moment. Funny stuff happens at night.”
Incredible Photos of Fireflies and Tips on How to Make Your Own
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In late spring and early summer, Bulgarian photographer Hristo Svinarov has about one month to capture the fireflies in the forests of Ropotamo Nature Reserve along the Black Sea. During this brief window of time, the lightning bugs dance in the woods for just an hour after every sunset before vanishing into darkness.
Svinarov has been chasing fireflies for six years, and he’s photographed them all over. Ropotamo Nature Reserve is his favorite spot because of the number of bugs in the area; “During that specific time of year, hundreds and maybe thousands of them dance here each night,” he tells us.
[sstk-pullquote align=”right”]“I have yet to see a face not light up with a big smile once the bugs come out flashing,” the artist admits, “Sometimes, on moonless nights, you feel like you’re in the middle of a galaxy.”[/sstk-pullquote]
Getting to the reserve is easy, but once he’s there, the photographer must abandon his car and move by foot. It’s a wild place, and fireflies aren’t the only creatures he encounters. He sees wild boars and birds regularly. “The woods are pretty alive at night,” he says.
One of Svinarov’s challenges comes in the form of mosquitos. Bug spray, he explains, will keep them at bay, but they will also drive away the lightning bugs. Clothing with sleeves is his only line of defense, and getting bitten is par for the course.
Sadly, firefly populations might be in danger. Last year, Tufts University biologist Sara Lewis published her book Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies, in which she addressed the current threats these creatures face.
Natural habitats have been destroyed to make way for land development and plantations, and man-made light pollution makes it difficult for the bugs to find mates. Pesticides are also taking a toll, both on the fireflies themselves and their food sources, which include earthworms, snails, and slugs.
Svinarov sees the signs. “Finding a good population of fireflies is getting harder,” he notes. Still, they continue to arrive at Ropotamo Nature Reserve in huge numbers every year, and as long as they do, the photographer will be there to witness their blinking lights.
“I have yet to see a face not light up with a big smile once the bugs come out flashing,” the artist admits, “Sometimes, on moonless nights, you feel like you’re in the middle of a galaxy.”
We put together this collection of magical firefly photographs by Hristo Svinarov in honor of the season. We also included some of his personal tips and tricks for catching some of your own, not in a jar but with a camera.
“I knew there was a decent image to be made with this tree, but I ignored it for years. One day, I went ahead and shot it to get it out of my system.”
Tip 1
Take time to know the place and consider all threats. The woods I go to are full of wild boars, and two out of three nights, I have encounters with them. Usually, wild animals want nothing to do with you, but remember you are the intruder, and act accordingly.
“For this images, I faced the problem of the firefly flashes being out of focus. I had to jack the ISO to 6400 in order to get good pictures of their flashing lights.”
Tip 2
Simply photographing the fireflies is not enough. The same rules for composition apply. You have to know your gear, mainly its ISO limits, as sometimes you need to go as high as 6400.
“I made this picture on a night out while I was helping some friends shoot some bugs for themselves.”
Photographing
Make your exposures in full manual mode, including manual focus. I usually set the focus to infinity. Determine your aperture, shutter, and ISO settings experimentally. You can use f/2.8, 15 seconds, and ISO 200 as a starting point.
If your camera supports long-exposure noise reduction, it is usually a good idea to turn it on. I usually make between 8 and 30 fifteen-second exposures with the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod and triggered by a remote shutter release.
I refine settings until I get a very dark background, a stop or so darker than the image shown above. It’s easy to lighten the background in postprocessing, and the pronounced underexposure helps the firefly flashes to retain a rich yellow or green color rather than being overexposed and nearly white.
Processing
We can approach this problem in Photoshop by making numerous exposures of medium length and loading each into its own PS layer. Layers work like sheets of clear acetate or mylar on which the camera paints its images.
It’s as though we are looking down through a stack of transparent sheets, and we would like to manipulate each sheet’s transparency so that we can see all the things that we want to see (and none of those we don’t) all the way to the bottom of the stack.
We can do this for our firefly image by loading each image into its own layer and setting each layer’s blending mode to “lighter color”. If we use a lighter-color blending mode, a point on a lower layer is visible on the layer above if it is brighter than the corresponding point on the upper layer. If we set every layer’s blending mode to “lighter color”, bright firefly flashes even on the bottom layer propagate up through the layer stack and are visible on the top layer.
Background luminance remains approximately constant in amplitude and in its location within the image, so lighter-color blending limits the background’s brightness to approximately the level we would see in a single exposure while recording all the firefly flashes that we have captured in multiple exposures.
At this point we should save out a safety copy of the image with blending mode and layers intact, then flatten the image to a single layer on which we can do further image processing to produce the final image.
All digital cameras produce luminance noise in which random pixels show up lighter or darker than the true luminance level in the photographed scene. It is a weakness of our method that spuriously lighter-toned background pixels propagate up through the layer stack just as well as fireflies do. Thus image noise increases approximately linearly with the number of layers.
We can either accept that our final picture will be a little noisy or we can correct the noise at the expense of image resolution by doing noise reduction on the flattened image. I use Noise Ninja from PictureCode for noise reduction. The first picture above uses noise reduction and the second does not. You can easily see the trade-offs if you look at both images in original size.
Specific Instructions for Photoshop and Adobe Bridge
In Adobe Bridge, highlight the images that you want to superimpose and load them into a layer stack using
Tools -> Photoshop -> Load files into Photoshop layers…
Your system will bog down or even freeze if it doesn’t have enough memory. As an example, I can load thirty 10Mpix RAW files on a Mac Mini with 4 GB of RAM, but the same thirty images will bog down a 2GB laptop.
Select Windows -> Layers to show the layer stack in a side panel and set each layer’s blending mode to “lighter color”.
Command-click on all the layers in the layer panel so that all layers are highlighted in blue.
Select Edit -> Auto-Align Layers to clean up any minor camera movement that occurred during the multiple exposures.
Save a safety copy of the entire layer stack as a TIFF or Photoshop PSD file.
Select Layer -> Flatten Image to flatten the layer stack into a single layer. Even at this stage I like the image to be a stop or so darker than it will be in its final form. In other words, the method works best if the image is still unattractively dark at this step.
Then do final processing on the flattened image to bring the background up. Photoshop’s shadow-highlight command provides one way to do this. Because I don’t want to change their color, I never add filtration to the fireflies, but I often add some blue (#80) filtration to the sky if it looks muddy once the background has been lightened.
About the author: Ken Rice is a photography enthusiast and retired biologist living on a small farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Visit his Flickr page here. This article originally appeared here.
