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 

PhotoProject :: LIVE TIME .vs. LIVE COMP for Lightning

I took the opportunity of the storm last night to test out two features LIVE COMP and LIVE TIME of my new camera. The Little Olympus, OMD EM10iii Mirrorless Camera. LIVE TIME lets you see a long exposure building up the image on the LCD screen (in 2 second updates so the lightning just lit up the whole sky (looked like sheet lightning, which it wasn’t)

Whereas LIVE COMP (the image above) takes a back ground image and then only add things that are stronger light,  (again I'd set this to 2 second intervals), its like I am doing highlight blend mode across several images (say 50 to 100). That’s how I got this photo with the forks of lightning and strong frozen backlighting of the tree. Yes I have cropped in a bit.

PhotoProject :: Mapping the night sky

I have had a personal project for a while of trying to map the night sky, the southern half of the milky way. i have a great vanatge point at venus bay and when the night is clear and moonless I brave the cool and take a number if long exposure shoots. then my ambition is to stitch them altogether and create a map of the visiable sky (like our eye sees it rather tan through a telescope. It can be  pretty damn amazing.

However I have found myself up against a numbers of technical issues. Trying to solve these will probably make interesting reading so I’ll post a little about my progress or lack of here, from time to time. The first issue is most panorama stitching software refuses to stitch stars on a black background. The exception is when I have a section of the horizon dimly lit as above which cover from due south to due east

Be prepared for more Supermoon hype BUT….

Just a heads up to let you know there will be (yet another) supermoon next week this time over two nights for Melbourne, The term supermoon is not from astronomy it is more astrological. The event is real enough, the full moon corresponds with the closest point that the moon gets to the earth and it can give those interested the opportunity to get some nice photos, because the full moon will rise close to sunset.  Depending on the local atmospheric conditions this could produce a pleasing coloured moon against a richer sky. However there are a lot of myths about the name supermoon, (read this lifehacker post), so don’t expect the moon to be really large or much brighter and there are unlikely to be major catastrophes. If you haven’t witnessed a moonrise its happens surprisingly fast.

…it is a good excuse to photograph the moon

Having dismissed  the hype, photographing the moon can be fun because it is quiet a challenge for an automatic digital camera (as it also is with film based photography). The main problems comes when you rely on light meters, they average the illumination. However the moon is bright against a dark sky, so most often the moon will appear as a bright circle (or big white blob with flare) perhaps with a purple halo and no internal detail. Our eyes however can better handle the contrast and our brain adjusts to a more balanced illumination and we can usually make out at least some detail. The essence of photographing the moon is finding the right exposure to capture the detail of the shadows and craters. There is a lot of advice on photographing the moon on the net, some a little miss-guided but here is a good place to find additional advice.

For the Super moon (or any full moon) close to the horizon, my suggestion for a good starting point will be to use a tripod, set you camera to manual and use a long lens (or zoom in).  Even though this is a night photo try to keep the shutter speed high (1/100 to 1/500) because the moon moves fast. The aperture can be standard (ie around f8) although if you have a foreground subject you want to include and you have the long lens it might be wise to go to a small aperture (eg f22) to avoid depth of field issues taking the moon or the foreground out of focus. This really only leaves you the sensitivity to adjust to get the desire exposure and it will probably be in the range ISO 400 to 1000. Most modern digital cameras will go up to at least ISO 800. The ambient light of your position and view can make a couple of stops difference to the exposure so it is a good idea to take a test shot or two of the general scene you want to photograph just beforehand (remembering when the moon rises there will be a little extra light, ie slightly under exposed is ok). Finally if you are familiar with taking bracketed exposure, this is the perfect time to set your camera to take 3 (or 5) photos at a range of EV values (-2 to +2 is a good range if your camera allows this) that way you should get at least one good exposure.

The second common surprise most people get when they photography the moon is it always appears smaller than what they saw? This is particularly so if there is something in the foreground. This is really a function of the cameras focal length being a wider angle (ie 50mm for a DSLR). The solution here is easy use a telephoto lens 200mm or longer, or zoom in and stand further back from the object in the foreground.

The Flickr community team have suggested a series of Noctural and Lunar Global Photo Walks for September, and there has already been a focus of events that match up to the supermoon occurrences next Monday & Tuesday. In Melbourne the key times are shown in the table below

Date	Event	Time
Monday 8th. September	Moonrise	5:11 PM
	Sunset	6:03 PM
Tuesday 9th, September	Sunset	6:04 PM
	Moonrise	6:24 PM

Source: WillyWeather.com.au/Melbourne/Wheelers Hill

If you are in Melbourne, we have already had two widely hyped super moons this year, but Tuesday 9th September will be the last opportunity to photograph a super moon from location for the next decade. So cloud cover permitting why not join the flickr global photo walks group and/or a group starting at the Monash Gallery of Art at 6:00 pm, more details on the MGA events page. Even if it is cloudy there should be some good long exposure opportunities.

ThePatch :: Real Estate Marketing

I’m not exactly the marketing type and estate agents leave me uneasy, so I figured this theme might be a real challenge for me. I did a bit of research of real estate ads in the paper and a then the little A4 posters in the agents windows. So their photos might in general be ordinary but a lot of effort had been put into the “over the top” descriptive headers. Rather than drive around and look for a specular house, I figure I should photograph my place (not for sale by the way) but perhaps in an “over the top” way like the agents descriptions. A long exposure night shot seemed to hit the spot after a tweak or two in perfect effects not sure I’m so good on the real estate speak headline itself.
 

Slowing Down

I have been experimenting with night photography, I like to figure things out for my self. It was a moonless start to the night last night and largely clear skies (a few light clouds drifted by). The longest exposure I can get on my Pentax K20 (without manually holding the shutter down in B Bulb mode) is 30 second so I have had to open the aperture right up (only f4 on this lens) and really crank up the ISO to 3200 (I can go to 6400 but the digital noise is then too great). I did get some reasonable shoots but this one, take into the last two street lights in town does give the charming feel of man's artificial world trying to compete with the ancient light of the stars.

Moral : Despite the brilliant flash effect the manmade lights only create local pools of illumination. The Stars are eternal.

Cool Evening on the Balcony

Southern Cross at the Tropic of Capricorn

Southern Cross at the Tropic of Capricorn I, originally uploaded by imageo.

This image of the milky way, including the southern cross, low on the horizon is an autostitched multi-image panorama based on 14 separate long exposure images


For PhotoFriday‘s topic After Dark

Starry, Starry Night

Some experiments with trying to map the sky at night. Using a set of 15 second exposures. Autostitch is actually up to the task, providing you have something detailed in the foregrounds, but I much prefer the warmer tines of my simple picasa picture pile collage.

Catch a Falling Star

Last night was a new moon and relative still. Good conditions to capture the night sky. So with a little experimentation in M for Manual on my canon, I opened it up (f4.5), set the ISO High (6400) and the exposure long (30 seconds), all on a tripod of coarse. There was a bit of cloud about but they just added to the mood. Distant car head lights on a nearby tree added to that ambience With such a high ISO and long exposure the resulting photos where littered with “digital” noise and Lightrooms RAW processor handles this well even with the luminance and colour noise sliders moved way to the right.
I did see a couple of brief shooting stars but my camera was not exposing at the time or pointed elsewhere, such is life. However as I looked in detail in Lightroom I did pick up some distinct streak which I am now fairly certain must have also been meteorites. I have seen other streak in long exposure that where a series of aligned dots, I assume these are aeroplane lights or satellite. The shooting stars/ meteorites giving a a continuous light.

PhotoFriday :: Skytracks

Can you figure out what the unidentified track might be in the night sky?  (I do know by the way). Taken at ISO 6400 at 30 second exposure on a dark but very starry night,

For PhotoFriday‘s topic In Motion

Abstraction via Long Exposure with Movement

I visited an interesting exhibition on Photographic Abstraction current on at the Monash Gallery of Art. What struck me most was the wide range of approaches and techniques and yet how strongly they followed photographic traditions. Then the realization that I had taken many similar photos as experiments, textural context and possibly specifically with a screen wallpaper in mind. Just last week I in fact played around with the idea of taking a very long exposure but moving the camera during the last part of the exposure. The image below is taken on a dark night, with a couple of house lights in the distance, Using a 30 second exposure I moved the camera to point at a street light (just off the original aspect). Resulting is some superimposed horizontal stripes of light in an abstract composition.

Extreme Astronomy Turns into Art

Last night I tried taking some time lapse images of the stars. The moon wasn’t up yet and the sky was incredibly dark, So I had to use longer and longer exposures just to get any light registering. Normally I just could the seconds as I have my camera in B (bulb) Mode and hold my remote control button tight while I count 1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds ….etc. Clunky but it works. Well I was getting several minute times required to I thought I’d use songs on my IPod to keep the time. the method worked well but the photos were very disappointing, with different colour cast and very noisy and hazy (all as expected given the long exposure times.

I quiet liked the colour casts I got looking in different directions, the blue is the nigh sky itself the yellow is a incandescant lamp inside (with the blinds drawn) and the orangy-red is a street light (a long way away). So I first removed as much noise as I could (using noiseware) increased the saturation to make the colours punchier and finally used the Dents filter in paint.net to overlay an interesting texture. The final collage below was made in picasa,

These are also available as screen wallpapers, from my free to download flickr screen wallpaper set.

Havelock North By Night

Happy New Year

Experimenting with long exposures to capture fire works. My Pentax has a B (for Bulb) Mode that keeps the exposure open for as long as you hold the button down. Trying to keep the camera steady for this hand held shot was a challenge but the camera was pressed firmly against the glass window (This also cut out unnecessary reflections)