This blog gives a day by day update to the progress of our tour along with some images from the day.
The tour couldn’t have got off to a better start with an Aurora Australis the very first night at the Tessellated Pavement. Our hotel was literally 100 meters from the Pavement so, with clear skies, we wandered down after dinner with our cameras and tripods.
After the first hour of shooting a star trail, suddenly about 6 other photographers arrived within 10 minutes. After chatting to most of them as they arrived, one lady mentioned she was here because of the Aurora alert. I passed this info onto the others in our group but I honestly didn’t give it much of a chance as Aurora’s in Australia are rare and often very insignificant.
However, within 30 minutes, one of our group exclaimed “there’s green and red on the horizon in my image!” We all reviewed our latest photo’s and sure enough, there was the start of the Aurora. It grew in brightness over the next hour and was visible to the naked eye although the camera’s certainly picked up far more detail. There was even a period where the curtains were visible.
The start trail above was early on and only captured the last few frames of the aurora which is not as bright as it got later. This is a blend of 30 images, each 2 minutes in length and blended in Photoshop. Therefore this is a 1 hour star trail.
I then commenced a time lapse of the aurora in action. The beauty of this is that I ended up with 296 separate images which allows me to create the time lapse and I now have 296 still images to choose from for my Aurora photo. I choose the one above. It is a 10 second exposure at F2.0 ISO 3200. I ran the RAW file through Topaz Denoise AI (best noise reduction program in the universe) before processing it in ON1.
Finally, here is the completed Time Lapse. It also has sound if you want the full enjoyment.
If you would also like to learn how to capture amazing nightscapes like this, check out my 2022 Workshops.
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Rare View provides Photographic Training and experiences through workshops and tours. I also create Time Lapse videos for production and advertising companies.
