Alaskan Night Light

Image Critiques Weekly Challenge
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Night Lights
Night Lights1600×1067 354 KB

I looked at the weekly challenge and wondered what I had or could come up with that had red, green, and blue. I thought maybe some old tulip photos, and then I realized that I was staring right at an image with all three colors. This might be a bit of a stretch from pure primary, but I couldn’t resist.

This image was taken on our last full night in Alaska in late March a little south of Delta Junction. We had two consecutive nights with minor substorm activity. In this location, we had some mountains and we were the only ones there. :smiley: We stood out there with our heads tilted back watching an amazing display for a couple of hours or so, between scrambling around with our cameras and exclaiming how great it was. :smiley:

Specific Feedback Requested

Any. I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to try this kind of photography or post processing, so if you have any aurora tips, feel free to share. :slight_smile:

I was experimenting here with an old full frame camera with a fixed 35mm lens at f2.0 (wide open). I kind of liked retaining a bit more “presence” in my foreground objects, especially the other direction where the mountains were a bit more distant. In this particular case, I’m not so keen on the half-mountain on the right, but I don’t quite like to crop it out either.

If you have any feedback on focal length, I’m interested. I don’t know if it’s appropriate discussion here if it’s not specific to this image, so if not you can ignore that part.

Technical Details

Is this a composite: No
Sony Rx1, fixed 35mm at f/2, ISO 1250, 10s. I was trying various shutter speed and ISO settings as the aurora changed. I tended to use longer speeds with this camera than with my wider or wider and faster lenses.

Minor white balance adjustment. I applied Paul Reiffer’s night sky style brush in Capture One as it seemed to help increase the definition in the aurora, but I pulled the opacity back quite a bit on the layer so it’s only at 19%. Most of the adjustments were dynamic range adjustments with a small amount of dehaze, clarity/structure, and noise reduction. The night sky layer does have a little saturation in it. I understand it’s more like “vibrance” for Lightroom users. Overall, the changes from the raw file are actually fairly subtle.

2 Likes
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Karla, from what I’ve read (no actual experience involved), getting reds in the aurora is fairly rare. It’s great that you’ve got both red and green in the sky, with some fine shapes in the green. Yes, I agree that the blue in the sky is a stretch, but clearly stretch a color definition looks to be part of this week’s challenge and “pure primary” is not a requirement. The trees and ridge are fine additions. I’m thinking it’s the Pleaides, just above the horizon and between the trees.

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@Mark_Seaver Thanks for your comments and also for naming Pleiades. I kept looking at that grouping of such bright stars in the photo and thinking I should recognize it. :slight_smile: It seems like white balance is sometimes a bit subjective with aurora, and I could probably push the blue a little more blue but probably not enough to look primary. I’m glad a little stretching is allowed. :slight_smile: