Northern Lights Night
Report from a photo trip to Lofoten - 34
Spectacular multi-colored aurora seen from the beach of Uttakleiv, Lofoten, Norway.
I am often asked if this image of the aurora is what it actually looks like. The answer is no. But the reason is not that the image is manipulated in any way. The reason lies in the lack of color sensitivity of the receptors (cone cells) in the human retina. This is why we perceive the colors less well at night, our vision concentrates on the brightness contrasts. The optical impression of the northern lights is therefore dominated by the relatively bright green stripes, the red areas are hardly noticed and at least don't appear as strong as in this picture. However, with the long-term exposure, the camera sensor is very well able to record the actually existing color tones. As a side note, you can also see far fewer stars with the naked eye than in this shot.
The image was captured with the Nikon Z 9 in camera-raw format (".nef") and therefore needed post-processing (this is done in-camera when shooting in jpeg format). I basically applied my standard post-processing in Lightroom that I would also apply to "normal" daylight photos. Apart from that, color temperature was set to be a little cooler than recorded by the camera. Furthermore, I corrected the exposure up by about two stops to reveal the details of the cliffs. (I had chosen relatively short exposure times for night shots so that the northern lights do not show any motion blur and the stars remain points. In my experience, the exposure correction in post-processing essentially has the same effect on image noise as increasing the ISO value when taking the picture.)
(ISO 1250, 8 s, f/2,8)
Northern Lights Night
Report from a photo trip to Lofoten - 34
Spectacular multi-colored aurora seen from the beach of Uttakleiv, Lofoten, Norway.
I am often asked if this image of the aurora is what it actually looks like. The answer is no. But the reason is not that the image is manipulated in any way. The reason lies in the lack of color sensitivity of the receptors (cone cells) in the human retina. This is why we perceive the colors less well at night, our vision concentrates on the brightness contrasts. The optical impression of the northern lights is therefore dominated by the relatively bright green stripes, the red areas are hardly noticed and at least don't appear as strong as in this picture. However, with the long-term exposure, the camera sensor is very well able to record the actually existing color tones. As a side note, you can also see far fewer stars with the naked eye than in this shot.
The image was captured with the Nikon Z 9 in camera-raw format (".nef") and therefore needed post-processing (this is done in-camera when shooting in jpeg format). I basically applied my standard post-processing in Lightroom that I would also apply to "normal" daylight photos. Apart from that, color temperature was set to be a little cooler than recorded by the camera. Furthermore, I corrected the exposure up by about two stops to reveal the details of the cliffs. (I had chosen relatively short exposure times for night shots so that the northern lights do not show any motion blur and the stars remain points. In my experience, the exposure correction in post-processing essentially has the same effect on image noise as increasing the ISO value when taking the picture.)
(ISO 1250, 8 s, f/2,8)