Photographing the Aurora in My Style

For longest time one item that has been on my photographic bucket list was to photograph in Aurora from Venus Bay. It’s been frustrating. I’ve managed to photograph the Aurora colours through cloud cover unconvincingly for a long time. The main problem is the difficult to predict when the Aurora will reach Victorian coast. So far I have found the Space Weather service provided by our Bureau of Meteorology is probably one of the best sources of near future aurora predictions. To be visible from the victorian coast the K-index must be 5 or more,

 https://www.sws.bom.gov.au/Space_Weather

Last Monday and Tuesday were predicted to have an excellent chance of seeing and photographing the Aurora from coastal Victoria. I went out on Monday night but was not able to see any evidence of an Aurora. Things changed on Tuesday night, I ended up at Venus Bay Beach Qne along with quite a few other families, just in time to see Aurora Australis was developing first of all as a pale green arch/swipe across the horizon and then some purplish curtain of low light going vertically up into the sky. There were occasion white vertical flare adding to the curtain and often reaching a little higher. View with unassisted eyes the intensity was dullish and the colour washed out and more grey. It is well known that the current generation of mobile cameras captures more intense colours at night (especially the purple/pink hues). You just set the phone to night mode, and it seems to capture enhanced colours compared with what you actually see. This image is what I call my “cheat” image. And was taken with my Samsung phone.

I really wanted to photograph the Aurora with my regular camera, my beloved little Olympus , which has a live composite mode and an in-camera long exposure feature that only adds new light sources to a composite image, preventing overexposure and making night shooting easier by showing the effect live on the screen, unlike traditional long exposures which normally blank screen and  just stack all light. It works by taking multiple shots and compositing them, recording only changes in illumination above the ambient exposure  This makes it ideal for star tracking and extra long exposure without overexposing the image. The headlights of cars arriving at the car park were a bonus, occasionally "painting" light the grasses in from of my tripod, which gave a more interesting foreground. The image below was taken over a three minute period.

I believe the K-index number was around 7 to 8 at the time I took these 

Day One ... cont. jpeg .vs. .orf RAW

This was not a surprise. My lightroom (still ver 4.4) could not read the Olympus RAW format .orf. The same thing happens to most owners of new cameras, they have to wait for an update from adobe and they complain a lot on the internet. Please don’t think I’m just complaining, I understand the issue but I not interested in the adobe subscription so this probably marks the beginning of the end for lightroom in my photographic tool set.

On the left is the jpeg image straight out of the camera, shot in Auto. On the right is the same image but the .orf version read by Aurora HDR 2018, which can read the Olympus .orf RAW format. To keep with the spirit of using Auto I have only used it’s basic Tone Mapping (just stretching the tonal range) as a fairly basic thing you might do with any RAW file. I like both but the one of the right feels more like being there, so I made it my PhotoFriday post this week.

Did Windows 10 have an accomplice?

I have slowly got my two very sick Windows 10 computers back to health (one by a full reset and the hassle of reloading all my software and data and the other by a in place reset). Its taken the best part of four days and a decent amount of angst. I’m none the wiser of the cause, but I’m slightly worried one of the software packages I’ve recently installed (or more particularly related drivers) might have cause some incompatibility. I had really only installed a number of photo software Luminar (as a windows beta version) On1 RAW Photo 2018 (as a trial version) and Aurora HDR 2018.

The Windows beta of Luminar didn’t seem a real candidate because I had been using it for a while and it was installed on the another windows 10 computer that didn’t exhibit the update problem. Aurora hadn’t been installed on this computer and when I tried to install On1 Photo RAW 2018 it reported that the computer was not compatible with Open GL 3.3 (yet I use mining software on that machine that relies on Open GL and currently uses version 3.3). On1 Photo Raw also proved essentially unusable on the HP spectre small screen and frequently froze in tablet mode. Frustration overload

I have purchase Aurora HDR and love it, so I’ll be making sure it works fine before I try reloading either of the other programs. I do like Luminar but it doesn’t yet do any file management or cataloguing so I’m still stuck with lightroom for the time being. I also like On1’s stuff, especially its layering, masking including great luminosity masking tools and blending, but if it only works on one of the three machines that I will be using, it is definitely off the potential purchase list for now (so I’ll stick with On1 Photo 10.5 for now)

Single Image HDR

The new Aurora HDR 2018 for Windows can perform all its normal tone mapping on a single photo.The original for this was a bit over exposed (as you might expect for a largely white bird high in the sky). The default "HDR" was in fact very realistic, yes the clouds where that dark and threatening rain. So I only changes a few of the basic tonal slider and smoothed down the noise in the sky. Since this was only the fourth image I had processed in Aurora HDR 2018 so I'm impressed already, just a bit more to work out on defringing.

In Search of Aurora Australis

 Last night had a high K index so I went out for a while looking for Aurora activity, but the ambient light of the city was probably too bright, the maximum activity was over New Zealand and probably I'm too far north anyway. Still I had a little fun doing some low light multi-stitch panoramas. This is a three photo vertarama, created with autostitch.

Looks like its back to the drawing board and a visible copyright icon on my flickr photostream.