So what is this? It’s actually a series of photos, taken from the same spot on a tripod, at several different times throughout the day; a day-to-night photo. With all the capabilities in photoshop, it’s easy to composite, layer, and merge something like this together.
The first part is just standing around and taking photos, being mindful not to move the camera at all. Obviously the light will change from the middle of the day to sunset so it’s best to shoot in manual and adjust your settings to what you want.
After all that, there may be several/many shots you won’t use, but what I did was took several photos from nearly the same time, and layered them, using one as a base and the others to paint in certain things that come in the frame such as people, vehicles, animals, planes, etc.
Next was to fade the image from left to right, day to night using gradient layers. I only used four or five photos from daylight, sunset, twilight, and nighttime. If the framing is perfect and hasn’t moved you can just drop each photo on top of another, if there is slight movement you can do a perspective photo merge and as long as it’s minimal, it’'ll match up just fine.
Once I was happy with the gradients, I made some final adjustments, cropped in a little and was done! See the photo below and keep an eye out for more of these in the future!
