Weightless

Wow! How did you get that so evenly lit at the top?

Not sure, to be honest. I knew standing there between takes that there should have been a drop-off problem. And I was assuming I could even the tones out when I printed it later this winter. But after this preliminary scan, I also don't see that problem at all.

All I did here was to set a black point to the sky and follow that with a basic contrast adjustment, sharpen to eliminate normal scanning softness, and spot out a few dust bunnies. That's it. These are all things that are either corrective for normal scanning deficiencies, or regular steps I would take in the darkroom.

So I'm not really sure why it looks so good. But the negative itself is killer sharp because of the strobe effect.

[Edit: I think I may have figured this out. That night I was using my Vivitar 285HV electronic flash unit. I knew that my subject would be centered against a pure black night sky. So I remember setting the zoom head to its telephoto setting to concentrate the light toward the center of the frame. But although it's concentrated, it's not a perfect spotlight. I'm thinking that the normal falloff toward the edges may have almost perfectly matched decreasing distance to the tower nearer the bottom of the frame, so the overall impression is one of even illumination. Maybe??]

In the conditions this is really superb. Worth a print on your wall where it is bound to get the how where, what did you do comments?