The Frandy Tree, Perthshire
Aurora Borealis lit up the skies in the northern hemisphere last night in a stunning colour burst of pinks, purples and greens. The night started off as a simple excursion and I only expected to be out for an hour or so. That quickly changed and went on all the way until 3am, a little over six hours passed in the blink of an eye. Here are some pictures I made in rural Perthshire, Scotland (I will add more to this article later). If you are here to look at the pictures, just ignore the photography detail aimed at improving amateurs’ shooting techniques and enjoy:
The headline shot is one of the last shots of the evening, before I left at about 3am, of the classic location, at the Frandy tree in Glendevon. In this exposure, I used a Sigma 14mm f/1.8 prime and when doing the long exposure foreground (at f/5.6), the red glow of my headtorch caught the area under the tree. Although I took another without this, I left this in because it just works visually here.
During the night there was a thin veil of high cloud, causing the stars to glow in many exposures, ideal for this type of shooting:
Aurora over the Flee ‘n’ Forkie
I feel it is important not to be afraid of shallower depth of field in daytime and nightime landscapes. Everything doesn’t need to be in the focal plane. The above picture is shot at f/4 for the foreground (focused on the boat), and f/1.8 on the sky. You can notice the very front of the picture is outwith this plane of focus. It leads us into the picture. I don’t want the viewer gazing into the dark foreground corners. Consider this when shooting your own pictures. Focus stacking is over-rated when you know your own end goal with regards to a picture. Notice the lack of noise, even on a compressed web resolution image? This is what taking care and being precise at the scene looks like. You gotta work to make it as best as it possibly can be. Quality over Quantity.
The following shot is made with a Sigma 14mm 1.8 lens. I also have a tracked panorama of this scene which will show even more detail. I’ll post that after I get a chance to look at it. This picture here shows constellations Auriga with Jupiter below it (left side), and centrally, Perseus. The far right is Cassiopeia. All shrowded in faint auroral glows of greens, pinks and purples:
Aurora and Auriga, Perseus and Cassiopeia. Sky shot at f/1.8, foreground at f/5.6 for higher image fidelity. (Sky was not tracked in this example).
Then came the strongest aurora of the night:
The thing about shooting aurora is that is it nearly always different. Provided we can find the right scene, it it ever changing and the patterns create a uniqueness to each picture. Below is probably my favourite from the night, just because it is so unique:
Pillars of Red
This image was a complex one to blend the foreground to the sky to create; trees can be a real stumbling block because selecting fine branches is extremely difficult. I used a luminosity selection using Jimmy McIntyre’s ‘Lumi32’ (highly recommended) in order to get a finely detailed mask, then I used brushes at low opacity to ensure every fine branch matched to create this seemless result. I also recommend Jimmy’s Raya Pro suite.
Even as the aurora slowly faded from a period of high activity, it is still easy to make a beautiful picture. A definitive image is much more than sky colours! We could shoot aurora over bins and washing lines, we could shoot it from laybys and other ugly places, however that is not going to produce a memorable picture. Who would want to hang something like that on their wall? My best advice summarised is as follows: Find a suitable location, or better locations. Use fast primes of decent quality, and ideally a full frame 35mm camera. When proecessing, do not forget it is dark at night. I know, seems obvious right? However it seems like it is not to the folks on instagram or facebook these days who seem obsessed with making night look like day with their unnatural shadow pulling. Keep it dark, and balance this by not burning out black areas unless doing so intentionally. Watch the highlights. Where possible, do a long exposure of the foreground right after. This means we can blend it and get rid of noise. It’s also why it is ideal (when you get more advnaced) to shoot with two cameras at the scene, then you are less likely to miss anything as the aurora waxes and wanes. To begin however, you don’t need much of any of this. You just need to get out there with a camera and tripod to get started. As the night went on and the temperature, which had plummeted well below zero causing ice to form on all of the equipment; I switched on my lens heaters as they began to form ice crystals. The aurora finally died away and the hours of being in the punishing cold began to affect me, I finally called it a night.
Fading Aurora
Before Aurora showed up