Eight of us had a wonderful evening under clear dark skies at the Big Hill Springs parking lot. A great place for “Blue Hour” photography with interesting tree silhouettes. Most of the light pollution from Calgary is shielded in this location. Just the stars alone made this worthwhile. At around 11 pm we saw faint aurora displays in the northern part of the sky. Barely visible to the naked eye, but the cameras picked up colour and some faint purple definition. All in all a great experience.
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This is probably the best image I got last night around 11:30 pm. It was enhanced in Photoshop Camera Raw using the texture, clarity and dehaze sliders, which brought out extra colour and brightened the stars. I then applied the levels tool to normalize the histogram a bit and removed distractions at the bottom of the image by sampling and then painting the offending parking lot signs away. Click on the image for a full screen display, this will show the stars much better.
Wow that’s stunning Henri!
In this image I tried to frame the Big Dipper between some trees. Similar post processing as the previous image, just a bit less on the “Dehaze” slider. Again this photo is best viewed when you enlarge it by clicking on the image
Used perspective crop to straighten the trees somewhat for a more pleasing image. Also played with saturation sliders in Camera Raw.
Here is a sense of scale of the Aurora phenomenon last night. This image was taken with a 14 mm lens. I had my red LED headlamp illuminate the car next to mine.
Thank you Henri for organizing such a fun outing! A few of first attempt at aurora photos, most of them were enhanced in post processing in Lightroom
another image
this one is brightest
One more image
I like the night sky
Wow Della, How did you do that. I tried several tricks in Camera Raw but can’t come close to that gorgeous effect. Especially the colour variation in the stars. This is my rendition. It has some flaws, I bumped the camera as you can see in the star trails.
I put a mask on the sky and boosted the saturation .
the light painting helps this image
I found fiddling with the white balance and levels produced the best results. This one I also sharpened up the stars a bit using GIMP. ISO 1600, f/4, 29.1 s.
Wow, I love the columns of hot pink/purple
Car headlights were illuminating the out house area when I took this one. ISO 1600, f/4, 24.5 s.
With outhouses roof removed.
Car tail lights in the far distance and reflected off the concrete barrier, with another car’s headlights illuminating the tree. ISO 1600, f/4, 30.6 s.
The brightest of my pics. Cropped only.
f 2.8, 8 sec, iso 1600, 12mm (mft), 24 mm (ff), wb around 3500
Gorgeous composition. You captured the columns just perfectly. I like how you kept the green muted and the tree silhouettes ink black.
Here is my picture of big dipper. Similar settings to previous pic. Minor post processing to boost whites and darken blacks and increase vibrancy.