Iceland Aurora Photographic

So you have the night photography bug. You sit twiddling your thumbs in the daylight hours waiting for the light to fade so that you can go out and leave your camera perfectly still with its shutter open for many tens of minutes. You are not alone!!

Until recently it was common practice for landscape photographers to slightly underexpose image to increase highlight detail and increase saturation. But there is a new school of thought which suggests over exposing just short of blowing out the highlights will actually give you a better range of colours.

This tutorial looks at ways to convert your image to black and white using the tools available in Photoshop CS3. There may be work arounds for other versions of photoshop or other image editors, but the work horse in this tutorial is the powerful 'Black and White Tool' in CS3 which has a great selection of filter presets. To emulate this without the tool, you could try blending channel levels.

The Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights is a light phenomenon that occurs as a result of solar winds reaching earth's outer atmosphere and burning different gases to give a range of different colours. The best place to see them would surely be from a very high viewpoint just outside earth's atmosphere.  Here on earth however, we need to travel to cold countries near the point where you would see the midnight sun in the summer and very short days in the winter. Iceland is one of those places. It is just touched by the Arctic circle on its very north isle of Grimsey, but most of Iceland is good for northern lights.

HDR4 - Photoshop enhancements

1) The first tutorial shows you how to fix strange HDR artefacts by using an original exposure as a selection aid and then using the clone tool to correct problems.

HDR2 - RAW file treatment

Click below to load an interactive flash tutorial covering the basic processing of files to be used in an HDR image...

HDR 1 - taking the exposures

HDR means High Dynamic Range photography. It refers to a method of capturing a larger range of light detail than is possible with a single exposure. This article will look at the technique of multiple exposure capture with a DSLR.

Night Photography - secrets uncovered

It was my love and obsession of capturing the Aurora Borealis, which uncovered a new passion... night photography.

HDR2 - Photomatix Engineering

Click below to load an interactive flash tutorial covering the generation of an HDR image...