Sharing another example of my editing here. Or perhaps a glance at the potential of editing.

My preference for most photos is to push for a light and bright result. Not so much to make night look like day, that's going too far, but to avoid the heavy weight of dark blacks and heavy contrast. I like things soft, and recognise not everyone digs this approach. I want my aurora shots to sit next to my other work and feel balanced.

In this instance, the RAW file was a bit underexposed, which is probably ideal for many folks I think. Lots of people tend to like the strong blacks and rich colours. The second edit in this example is perhaps closer to where most folks might head. Still not strongly saturated beyond the defaults (which are pretty intense for my tastes).

The final two in the quad have been tweaked for colour balance and saturation. Just wanting to demonstrate how much "personal taste" can influence the final colours you see in an aurora image posted online. I get a little cranky about hyper-saturated auroras. A lot of folks are excited to see their first aurora and get a little disappointed when it didn't look the same to their eyes as it did the photoshop saturation slider!

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Okey one more. This time my regular 14mm perspective, looking straight up at a corona. I picked this one from the same time of night, to match the other two 10mm shots in this thread.

I am struggling with editing these, because the colours are so intense. It looks un-natural, as though they are doctored. Yet I've backed off the saturation by double my usual amount. It really is an intense display when the big ones zip over head.

What colours are real? The camera is seeing a lot more colour than our eyes do. We did see the red and greens in the night, for sure. At times the sky was like daylight, but green and red. If you tinker with white-balance you can push those reds into purple, and the brighter greens into yellow hues. Reality is anything you want it to be on a night like this.

#EwenInNorway #Photography #Nordlys #Jan20 #AuroraStorm #Aurora

Was chatting to a friend today about the importance of having art in our lives. To focus our minds on creating art and expressing that aspect of ourselves. Art is like nature, we need to "touch grass" on a regular basis, and we need to "hold the brush" just as often.

Here's one of my favourite moments from last night. It's shot with a 10mm fisheye, so it's more than 180° of view from top to bottom. That burst of corona above the fjord is directly above my head, and then continues behind me to the south. The 10mm sees all of this.

I must take care to keep my head out of the shot in such moments :)

#EwenInNorway #Photography #Nordlys #Jan20 #AuroraStorm #Aurora