Green Visions

For the past three weeks I have had the pleasure of leading a photo trip to the far north high in the mountains of the Yukon. Along on this mini-expedition to one of the continent's most impressive ranges were two NPN photographer friends of mine, James and Colin.

We had a tremendous time out there, with the best shows of northern lights coming the first four nights of the trip and one more a little later on. Weather was not terribly cold yet and we were very lucky to have found open water along some of the lakes mixed with interesting shapes in the ice.

All of our photography was focused on complicated renditions that showed off this amazing landscape as much as it did the Aurora. I personally have seven or eight Aurora shots from which I cannot pick a favorite. This was one of them. Please read below:


Processing: This is a blend of more than 10 images aimed at solving a variety of technical problems and getting the view I wanted. First I took the landscape AND aurora you see here with THREE horizontal 14mm stacked and stiched vertically, for a nearly 180-degree field of view (that peak was way too close, and absolutely enormous). I took the mid-ground and aurora sky one after another at 10 seconds, as I couldn't afford loosing the faint reflections in the water. I then proceeded to work the foreground ice, which was picking up a diffused green glow from all around. I would have obviously preferred one exposure here but that wasn't even close to within the technical capacity of the camera. Instead, I used about 10 consecutive bracketed shots for DOF throughout, all at f/5.6, ISO 1600, 45 seconds.....so it took another 10 minutes to render the exposures needed for the foreground. Fortunately, the aurora was going throughout all the exposures so there weren't any major color or tonal variances throughout my exposing for the foreground ice.

Once in PS, I blended all images for DOF first. After that, I stitched the three 14mm images vertically, which overlapped about one third. When this was complete, I dodge/burned here and there for the final result.

All color everywhere in the image comes from RAW only, and it was all GREEN! I thought about removing some green in the landscape itself but it didn't look natural. I just have to consider the fact that everything here (snow and ice) reflects light well, and the only light source there was, was neon green! Therefore, I think the color rendition is accurate enough.

1Ds III, Nikon 14-24. Large version included.


Thanks for your comments,


Marc