Helen Chick
The signs were good for an aurora tonight, and so I ventured down to Seven Mile Beach.
And the aurora happened.
The only troubles were that the best of it was between sunset and moonrise (which was before I even left home!) and that I totally failed to master/remember any of the techniques that I know I should have used to get much better photos than the ones I did. So, although I could see a hint of something going on in the sky on the way down — and could see a faint glow in the sky once I arrived (even with my aged eyes) — the moon came up and light-polluted all over the place (see second photo), and I managed to do just about everything wrong with the camera: I didn’t have it focussed properly (the infinity focus spot is not where you think it is, and I knew this but forgot to set it up properly), I didn’t have the right white balance (note to self: I need to find out about that), I didn’t realise that the LED display would be so bright that I’d think I was overexposing the photos and so I ended up underexposing too many, I didn’t remember how to completely control the manual settings (I got bits of it right, but not all of it), and I think I should have taken the photo in RAW (not that I yet know what to do with it if I had, but it’s irrelevant since it is not worth doing any further work on the couple of vaguely half-decent photos that I got!).
This, then, is the only semi-meaningful shot for the night. It hasn’t undergone any post-processing (and most night photographers do do a bit of work on their shots, but there’s no point for this); it was taken at f5.6 for 30 seconds at ISO800 using the 18mm wide-angle end of my 18-200mm zoom. Having seen some of the other photos posted by other people capturing tonight’s aurora this one is embarrassingly lame in comparison but, in partial excuse, I missed the best of it anyway.
The moon was so bright I could read the time on my LCD watch display and you can see it is lighting up some of the open fields on the side of the hill above. In the photo below — where exposing for both the moon and the foreground is impossible — the speck of light above the horizon on the right is Jupiter.
PS I have since played around with one of the other aurora shots: this one has had the brightness and colour levels adjusted (and may actually be a smidge too green—I’ve always had difficulty getting colour right).
It all begs the question “What’s real?” It’s certainly true that the camera and the eye can see different things.
Later edit (19/10/15): I have done a little more playing around with one of the pictures in Lightroom, with the following result. In addition to all the areas-for-improvement listed above, think I need a remote shutter release too.
I honestly love both photos (and the new one), but certainly know the feeling of inadequacy in the control of my cameras. I just don’t use mine enough (my fault) to have come even close to understanding how to control them!
As for what is “real”? You only have to go into JB Hi Fi and look at their wall of televisions, all showing the “same” thing, yet each wildly different in brightness, contrast, and colour, to know that “realness” is a very individual thing! I have also found it liberating of late to take it one step further and “tweek/enhance” a feature in a photo to the point where it is no longer “real”, but better emphasises what moved me to take the photo.
Finally, there is a vast difference between what IS real to the naked eye, and what IS equally real to a camera with its shutter left open for thirty seconds to catch subtle nuances the eye may not even see.
(That’s a +10 for using “subtle nuances”, btw!)
I love what you’ve been doing with the tweaking. I’ve been a naive purist and have had this absurd feeling that it’s “cheating” to tweak things (and have been too time-poor to experiment in any case), but, of course, this is what can turn photography into art. Keep tweaking.