The Quiet Picture

With the big solar eruption the other day, the forecast for aurora was good last night. I wish the weather forecast had been equally good, but there were some clouds which could ruin the whole thing. I decided to try it anyway, I mean if I got a break in the clouds then it would definitely be worth the while.

As I was packing, I realised that I had forgotten to recharge the batteries. That left me with one almost empty and one half charged battery, which is not a lot in the freezing temperatures but good for some frames anyway.

When I was halfway to my spot, I realised that I had forgotten to take a flashlight with me. On a moonless night, a less than ideal situation and I was reluctant to turn back to get it (especially when the next possible place to make a U-turn was actually that spot I was driving to). Then I remembered that I had one of those small key fob flashlights in my car keychain so I checked if it still lights up after all these years – it did! Better than nothing, because it was really dark – no moon, and almost no stars because of the clouds.

It was -17°C so a bit on the cold side to be standing still all evening and wait for something to happen. It’s possible it would’ve been less cold if I had chosen a higher spot, but I was standing by a lake. The foreground is such a big problem (I haven’t found anything I’m happy with) that this time I decided to eliminate it out of the equation and go for the best open view instead.

The clouds finally cleared and revealed the stars but the aurora was not the spectacle I had hoped for. There was no action going on, just a big green mist that was actually beginning to fade out. I decided to wait until either my extremities or the camera battery would freeze and as it turned out, it was my nose. So I’m still waiting for my first great aurora picture, but at least I got to drive my new car. I love that car!

I was supposed to be studying last night, but at 8pm I couldn’t resist checking the aurora forecast and it looked like there would be a chance of some activity. So I packed up and left – I mean give me a break, I had been sitting in front of the computer for 13 hours straight already!

My usual spot (even if it’s not very good) is at the skiing track. We have the luxury of electric light on this track but hardly anyone ever skis there at night. Except tonight – it was lit. Horror! I had no chance but the walk a bit further; there’s a deforestated spot on the other side with an open view north. The only foreground interest at this spot is a lonely birch with hanging branches but at least there wasn’t a lot of wind so I got away with it. The sky was almost clear but I was looking at these things in the horizon and couldn’t quite make up my mind what it was. High cloud? Auroral glow? It all looked grey to me, but I knew that a long exposure would extract some colour in the scene if anything existed. So I took a shot and looked at the LCD and sure enough, it was greenish! (Yes I know that AWB and camera LCD is hardly a reliable source of information, but a comparison to the snow told me that there’s a difference.)

But now I had another problem. The clouds. And they definitely were clouds because they were obscuring the stars, even the bright star of Vega which at that point was in the northern sky disappeared from sight. So I kept moving about, changing my composition around this lonely birch, and glancing towards east where I could see this fairly consistent formation of clouds. I mean east, gotta be clouds, right? And I turned my eyes to north again, waiting, waiting.

I had been standing there for an hour, still trying to figure out the difference between cloud and aurora. At least the sky was starting to clear a little bit, but it was cold and I couldn’t decide if I should stay or go. And just when I was getting closer to leaving than staying, I saw something in the horizon… that must be it! I’ll stay.

Miracles do happen. For a brief moment, I saw the aurora dance in the sky and I was so happy I nearly cried.

All the while this was going on, that persistent cloud formation in the east was getting brighter. At one point it looked like two gigantic spotlights pointed towards the sky and I was starting to have serious doubts. How can clouds get brighter at night? They can’t. The light show was already fading so I took a few quick steps, pointed the camera towards the lights and hoped for the best. I hit the bullseye with the birch and by the time I had I moved into a better position, the aurora had visibly faded, just one minute between the frames and the difference is clear. Nothing to see here folks, go home.

Waiting pays off. I may only have a few noisy frames with modest auroral activity to show for it, but I don’t regret trading my studies for those hours in the snow. Magical, as always.

I surprised myself by making an effort last night. There was half a chance to see some auroras and now that the weather has turned for the warmer, I thought it’s worth a try. Even if the wind was really bad so I knew that any trees I would put in the frame would be fuzzy in the long exposures, and there was absolutely no moonlight whatsoever to help out lighten the foreground and sky. Not that I really minded the lack of light on the foreground because I don’t have any good ones which would be worth lighting up. In fact, you could see some snow detail in the original pictures but I put a ruthless gradient on it to hide it. Just not worth seeing.

I got to my spot a bit too late and the light was gradually fading as I was standing there. The first frames still show some traditional aurora features (very little) but in the last frames it’s only a faint glow that was barely visible with naked eye, but the long exposure helps to bring it out in the picture.

The biggest lesson I learned last night is that my foreground sucks. I can’t find any spot within an easy walking distance from home that would offer a nice foreground for the aurora. So now I have to find a nice place I could reach by car (and quickly).

But I’ll say this about the dark night. There sure are a lot of stars in the sky!

Today I hiked to the peak of Lill-Skarven (1224 m). It was promising to be a relatively easy and quick hike, except that if you park your car by the road 84 in Tänndalen, the entire hike is uphill from there to the peak. The only places where it levelled off at all was when the trail crossed some small wetland areas (duckboards over them). There is an alternative route with less climbing if you take your car up to the Fjällparkering which is close to the tree line. But having done a few of these small mountain roads, I didn’t want to put my car through the ordeal again so I decided to punish my feet instead. But my feet were fine, and later on when I walked down that road, I found that it was actually quite fine as well. Maybe next time then.

The view from Lill-Skarven is fabulous. I know I always say that the view is great, and naturally it always is because the peaks give you a high vantage point. But Lill-Skarven is better than average, it feels right in the middle of the mountains and closer to them as well. And one thing I found attractive is the view towards the valley of Anderssjö with mountains all around.

On the way down, I decided to check the view from the Skarvvålen height. It doesn’t require any climbing as it’s just kind of an extension of the mountain, but I was looking for an alternative viewpoint towards the valley and the Hamrafjället mountain so it was worth checking out. It turned out that the view wasn’t that special, but then when I was going back to the trail, I saw a herd of reindeer on the slopes of Lill-Skarven. They were moving slowly but the general direction was east, which is where I was heading as well. So I thought it’s worth a try to see if I could get closer to them, and took a diagonal approach so I would be ahead of them if they would continue towards east. And amazing things happen – they did come towards me and when I saw that I might have a possibility to use them as silhouettes against the sky, I took the risk of getting closer. And they allowed me to do it!

What I then got to witness is something I will not soon forget. The herd consisted mostly of females, plus two young bull reindeer and one older (bigger) bull. The reindeer mating seasons starts in September and the two young bulls were sparring with each other, crossing their antlers so I could hear the sound they were making. If only they would’ve come up a few steps closer to me I could’ve gotten their fighting profile against the sky… but I wasn’t that lucky. And by the time I got their silhouette, they were not sparring any more because the big bull appears to have cooled them down. It was not tolerating any challenges so it chased off the young bulls while running around the cows to make sure they would not stray off.

Although the reindeer allowed me to get so close, they did keep a watchful eye on me. I’ve heard that the only time a reindeer might be a threat to a human is during mating season when the bulls get too excited. So when this running and chasing was going on, a couple of times it looked like they would be running towards me and that really got my heart racing! But this is probably still early season for them, the bull was flemming but none of the females were ready and I didn’t really see any aggressive behaviour from the dominant male, apart from the moment it thought the young males got too close.

It’s easy tell the males and females apart. All reindeer grow horns, but the males shed the velvet skin on theirs before mating season while the females keep it, and just like with other animals with horns, the older the animal the bigger the bigger the horns. So if you look at the pictures, you can easily tell apart the cows and the bulls, and also the dominant male and the future challengers (they didn’t seem to pose much of a challenge today).

What did I say about putting experience first and pictures second? Well, this one was an experience for sure. And one of my photographic aspirations is to picture a reindeer silhouetted against the sky, and I think I kind of got that one as well. Can’t ask more from a hike!

I was in a hurry to get some sleep last night so I will write down the full experience now. I’m new at aurora photography (and night photography in general) so I have to take some notes to learn.

But before I get to the nuts and bolts of the event, I just have to say this – it was awesome! It was just me, my camera, the northern lights and an owl howling in the neighbourhood. Well worth the sleep deprivation!

1. Composition

I used a hot shoe bubble level to level the camera and pointed it in the general direction of the northern lights. Take a picture, check the LCD and then adjust camera position, repeat process until the desired composition is reached. It worked out so well that I didn’t even need to crop the pictures in post-processing.

How in the world they did this with film I’ll never know!

I wasn’t spoiled with foreground options. We have forest everywhere (even if de-forestation is one my favourite complaints) so there aren’t many open views within a walking distance, especially those towards north and without light pollution. I was standing on a forest clearing with these lonely trees scattered around, so it was just a matter of picking out the most suitable tree to provide a silhouette against the lights. Considering how dark the pictures are, it’s safe to say that the aurora alone wouldn’t lift the photo. Even so, it’s a close call – there’s an awful lot of “dark matter” in the frame.

I’m also glad that the Sigma 15mm f2.8 fisheye is earning its keep now. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I found very little use for it last summer – I just can’t handle wideangles, fisheye or straight. But now with the auroras, I would have found myself in a spot of bother with the 24-105mm f4. Calling it a wideangle on the 1.6 crop factor sensor would be very generous!

2. Exposure

I had done my homework on what settings to use when photographing auroras. I didn’t have any help from the moon last night though, so my starting point of ISO 400 and 10 sec, lens wide open seemed a bit too dark and I lost some of the faint peripheral auroral light with that. I stepped up to ISO 500 and 15 sec, but when the aurora started moving (most of the time it just seemed to glow and not “dance” as you normally see in the northern light images), I went back down to 10 sec to catch the detail.

ISO 500, f2.8, 10 sec

Moonlight would really help, I hate the noise of ISO 500. Not that the noise was pretty at ISO 400 either. The digital noise is a bit too patterned as compared to film, making it twice as undesirable.

I checked fotosidan to see if other people have posted pictures from last night, and the aurora pictures in general. I was interested to see that they had used considerably longer exposures – in many cases over a minute. That helps to get the ISO down (and the lens can be stopped down as well), but the downside is that with longer exposures, you start getting star trails and that’s not good. The small trails can’t be seen in the web images, but they are most definitely there in the full size image. 15 sec will prevent trailing in the northern sky like in these images, so if I need more light, it will have to come from boosting the ISO rather than making longer exposures.

3. Focus

I started with the lens focused on infinity. I wasn’t sure what that would do with my foreground trees, so I tried with different focus settings – focus just shy of the infinity mark, on the mark, and little beyond. The 40D preview picture isn’t very sharp because it uses the low res JPG, but it is possible to compare different pictures so I used these different focus settings in consecutive frames and then compared them to one another, and was able to determine that the focus setting just shy of the infinity mark was best. When I got the pictures on the computer, I was happy to see that it had indeed been the correct decision!

4. Light

Being a night photography newbie, I keep discovering new things every time I try. For example, these long exposures can catch light that my eye doesn’t see.

I don’t know if it’s some digital idiosyncrasy or if the auroral light really was like that, but my eye was only seeing varying strengths of green, while the picture shows some other hues.

ISO 500, f2.8, 15 sec

The sensor also caught some light pollution in the north (left of the birch in the above image), although I wasn’t able to see it. I reckon it must be KÃ¥rböle. To ENE, there was a visible glow of light (lower right edge in the image), maybe Ramsjö or even Ã…nge (100 km as the crow flies). And now that I’ve been staring the full res images, I can see that there is actually just the faintest of orange glows across almost the whole horizon below the green lights, and I’ve no idea where it comes from.

Now I’m just waiting for the next opportunity to see and shoot the auroras before the season is over!

This is peak time of the year for auroral activity. It was a clear night and the aurora forecast confirmed the high activity, so I packed the camera and set out to the closest spot with an open view towards north. I finally got some half decent pictures of the northern lights! I tried it last year, but the results were poor at best.

Sigma 15mm f2.8 @ f2.8, ISO 500 @ 10 sec (cloned out a radio mast light)

The bright star on the right is Vega, with Cygnus in full view between Vega and the birch.

I was out for a couple of hours, gave up when the light seemed to be fading and my fingers and toes were starting to freeze. I was home just before 11pm. As a sign of my lack of dedication to my hobby – this is as late as I ever have been on a photographic outing. Usually I’m in bed by this time… speaking of which, it’s definitely time. Gotta work tomorrow!