Iceland Aurora Photographic

When you are taking your camera into cold conditions, it will be wise to follow a few simple precautions to protect you and your gear.

Feet

One of the most important thing to protect! They are, after all, what is going to get you out of potential danger.  You need to think about protecting them first and foremost.  Cold climates can present several different dangers to feet. The first is cold.

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 is a quick and simple technique for correcting the colour of an image in photoshop. It is not always successful and will not give you the desired results 100% of the time. But as it is quick and easy it is definitely one to try first.

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.

No camera is perfect. If we push it to the limits of iso and low-light scenes, we are going to experience the number one weakness of a digital camera - NOISE.

Hello Readers

Night Photography - secrets uncovered

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

Photographing Northern Lights - Aurora Borealis

Northern lights are great to watch. It involves the burning of atmospheric gases high above the earth as a result of solar winds from the sun. You stand on this planet and realise how small and insignificant we really are, how short our lives are and how beautiful this planet is. In essence it is Night Photography. Photographing them takes a bit of knowledge, but once you have it, it becomes as easy as taking any regular photograph.