This photo, and many of the others on these pages, are the work of Michael Walmsley Photography, Bellevue, WA.
This image of an operating lidar is a composite of two unmanipulated exposures on traditional silver materials. Except for multiple exposures to handle the wide brightness range, the image can be considered to be unmanipulated. Both exposures were taken from the same location, and with the same lens. The two exposures allowed us to handle the wildly different brightnesses of the system cabinet and the backscattered beam.
The first exposure was a long (note the star tracks!) time exposure of the natural atmospheric backscatter of the green transmitter beam. The second was made of the cabinet, using flash illumnination.
The two exposures were then combined digitally in Photoshop, to yield the final image you see here.