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FollowThe swirling Aurora in the sky together with the swirling water at my feet made for a very swirly experience - counterbalanced by those eternally immovable, ma...
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The swirling Aurora in the sky together with the swirling water at my feet made for a very swirly experience - counterbalanced by those eternally immovable, majestic mountains. What a night! Who needs to go clubbing if you have nature like this? Lofoten islands, you rock!
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Awards
Contest Finalist in Covers Photo Contest Vol 49
Contest Finalist in Long Exposure Experiments Photo Contest
Contest Finalist in Nature And The Night Photo Contest
Contest Finalist in Image Of The Month Photo Contest Vol 25
Peer Award
Absolute Masterpiece
Superb Composition
Magnificent Capture
Top Choice
Outstanding Creativity
Virtuoso
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Superior Skill
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Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
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Behind The Lens
Location
On the shores of a fjord near Reine in the middle of winter on Lofoten islands, Norway. The Fjord provided the mirror for a nice reflection of the Aurora. Lofoten are such magical islands, especially in winter.Time
In the middle of a cold February night. Clear night skies are quite rare at Lofoten Islands in winter – much rarer than Auroras. So, during most nights you can’t see the Aurora – not because it’s not there but because the clouds hide it. But I always go out and wait for the Aurora anyway. Because if the sky clears up you want to be there! It usually starts with a faint green glow, perceptible only to the sensor of the camera (if not for the human eye) promising more to come and big rewards for the patient.Lighting
Only available light, of course! Not only did the Aurora show her famous green stripes but also the mountains and the water in front of me were illuminated by the lights of the nearby fishing village of Hamnøy. For some that is light pollution. Not for me, I consider this additional illumination an important element of the composition – resulting in Aurora plus landscape instead of just Aurora plus black silhouettes.Equipment
This is a long-exposure panorama, shot with the Nikon D810 and the Nikkor 14-24 mm f/2.8 wide-angle lens, mounted on a sturdy tripod.Inspiration
The swirling Aurora in the sky together with the swirling water at my feet made for a very swirly experience - counterbalanced by those eternally immovable, majestic mountains - illuminated by the lights of the nearby fishing village of Hamnøy. What a night, what a composition! Sometimes it all just falls into place.Editing
My post-processing workflow is all about quality and quite involved - especially for such a panorama. Starting out with the best possible raw files I used DxO to convert the files into another raw format (.dng) using DxO's very good and gentle noise reduction and lens profile corrections for the particular camera-lens combination. Then I open all the .dng files in Lightroom and do 90% of the post-processing there, completely nondestructive, everything still in raw, and still working on the individual files - nothing merged to a panorama yet. I know, Lightroom has a panorama-function, but it is very basic and gives me not enough control. So, what I do is synchronize all my Lightroom-edits between the individual dng-files, then export them as 16-bit tiff-file. And those tiff-files I merge to a panorama with a specialized panorama-software called PTGui. Finally, I open that panorama in Photoshop as a 16-bit tiff for some final touches (like a slight Orton effect, some filters from Nik and Topaz, etc.). Then I save this 16-bit tiff and add it to my Lightroom library. Never, ever do I convert to jpg. A jpg file has only 8 bits of information-depth as compared to the 14 bits I started out with in raw. That is only a tiny fraction, namely 1/64th (or 1.56%) of the information I gathered with the camera (64 is 2 to the power of 6, and 6=14-8 is the difference in bit-depth between raw and jpg). Therefore, I do not consider jpgs as a decent photo format worth having in my library. The only time I touch jpg is when I export something to upload to the web.In my camera bag
For over 30 years I have always used Nikon equipment, in the end the mighty D800 and later a D810, the classic Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens and the Nikon 85mm f/1.8 lens, a Nikon D750 and the Nikon 70-200 f/4. But since about 2 years I have sold all this and changed to Sony mirrorless and never looked back. I now have the Sony A7RII and the Sony A7II as cameras, the Sony-Zeiss 16-35 f/4 and 55 f/1.8 lens, the Sony 28 f/2, the 85 f 1.8 and the 70-200 f/4 FE-lenses, and the ultrawide Voigtlaender 10mm f/5.6 VM.Feedback
Shooting Auroras will test the limits of your equipment and yourself. Always! It is cold. It is dark – VERY dark! Much darker than on the pictures you see (on pictures light has been gathered for a long time with high ISO). So, you need to know how to work your equipment by heart - and blindly. You want the exposure as short as possible to get as much structure as possible in the Aurora – but it will be several seconds anyway because it simply is so dark. The upper limit is around 30 seconds because otherwise not only is the Aurora just a structureless green smear but also the stars turn into streaks. You also want the ISO to be as low as possible to avoid noise – but you will need a high ISO anyway since it is just so damn dark! For me, the upper ISO limit I still accept is 6400. To achieve these ‘short’ exposure times of ‘only’ several seconds and ‘low’ ISO of less than 6400 you need a fast lens and open it all the way. I usually open any wide-angle lens only to ALMOST its limit because I know the lens is much sharper across the frame if I don’t push it all the way open – but that’s just me. And one more thing which I cannot stress enough: SHOOT IN RAW! And be careful to never convert to jpg in any step of your workflow! If you do, you throw away over 98% of the information in your raw file and from that moment onwards you work with less than 1.6% of your data (but still 100% of the noise)! And for those jpg-shooters out there: You did that already in the very first step of your workflow, i.e. when you shot the picture. So, don’t – especially not for Auroras! You need maximum data-information above the noise level of your High-ISO picture to get a decent image in post. Throwing away 98% of this information will leave you with images not worth your time or the space on your hard drive!