I wouldn't call them a fail, they have a pretty unique look compared to other aurora images I've seen. The foreground and clouds almost looks like they're in daylight.
With my limited experience (two semi successful nights of it) of this here in the UK, I find it incredibly difficult to find and frame up nice foregrounds for the aurora, mostly because you're limited by where in the sky it appears, but also because you've got to have a pretty wide field of view to get much interesting structure visible in the sky and whatever you've got on the ground ends up looking pretty insignificant.
This is great. All eyes on the dog. Nicely lit.
A difficult choice of crop, alternatives would be to lose the figure on the right, lose the figure on the right and the right hand machine, or lose the figure on the right and centre the couple between the two machines.
I had to double check the lion shots myself. They look like they're having a great old time.
That deer is adorable.
I usually can't get within a 1/4 mile from deer before they scarper. Well, excluding the one I met in the dark in Whinlatter forest one time.
I'd stupidly remained at the top of Lord's Seat to watch the sunset and now found myself having to work my way back through the creepiest forest imaginable, on my own, in the dark and without a torch.
Feeling my way along a path paved with tree roots eager to trip me and overhanging branches trying to grab me, or at the very least, knock my hat off, I eventually approached the edge of the forest. As I came around a bend in the path I briefly found myself face to face with a large animal, startling both of us. The deer bounded off into the night and I fell over onto the boggy ground. That night I learned a valuable lesson. Always carry a torch. Preferably two.
The farm is quite close, just about 2km from our home in the Hochkönig region, but it was the first time we'd ever walked in that direction!
The farmer also has a group holiday houses here with a lot of friendly and fairly tame animals around, I guess they get used to the tourists.
He told us that a hunter had found the fawn on it's own in the forest and the next day went back and it was still there, he assumed the mother had been killed and took it to our farmer who has a reputation of being good with baby animals.
This pigeon tower looks like interesting place with many photo opportunities. Love the wood shots.
I see that you shot aurora, but IMO 20 seconds in first shot is bit too long time, I try to keep time 1-5 seconds, to capture some northern light pattern, longer that that and it blends into uniform colour blotch thanks to movement.
Foreground bushes are there for several reasons :D
Firstly they keep out of sight another photographer who was on seashore. He wandered to some timelapse shots though.
Also it hides ships sailing past on horizon and lights from Finland cities across gulf. If the northern light is seen only at so low altitude that gets hidden by bushes it's difficult to distinguish them from artificial light and these are not worth shooting anyway. I made some shots also at seashore but foreground consisting of vast amount of water and some rocks is not as interesting as these bushes IMO. So I'm hoping that northern lights are visible high in the sky to get good capture.
When it comes to framing in dark then it's not difficult at all with modern technology. OM-1 has night vision mode, I configured one button to turn it on and off, so it's just matter of button press and everything becomes visible almost like in daylight (though in BW).
Completely agree. That's actually a posting error on my part. That's one of the first shots I took on that night and I still had the camera set to aperture priority as I normally have it for landscape shots, hence the overly long exposure. I did rectify this a few minutes later, switching to manual exposure and an 8 second exposure, which is still perhaps a little bit too long if you want to retain the structure of the aurora, although at that location there was very little visible evidence of structure as far as I could see.
Here's an 8 second version taken a few minutes later from the same spot. As far as I can see, it doesn't really look any different.
I did experiment with 4 to 6 second exposures later in the evening, which seems more optimal for retaining the structure as seen in this test shot (please ignore the terrible framing and location, it was just a test).
I was thinking that too, but on closer inspection, I believe a STEVE is a much more thinly defined structure (although speaking from personal experience, there's nothing thin about this Steve at the moment).
Amazing how we see repeated scenes of torture and execution in these old frescos. As if they really revelled in it back in the day.
I suppose it would make a nice day out for them to go and watch a public execution. I suppose it was all designed to show what happens to you if don't do what "they" say you should. And perhaps a perverse desire of the public to see the culprits suffer as much as possible and to be glad and relieved that they were only watching, and not part of the show (this time).
Great lighting with a good contrast of the dark sky and brightly lit building. The path is a nice leading line
I was wondering what this "device" might be then realised it was just a pile of sledges :-)
Took a wander up to Glentrool this afternoon hoping for some autumn colour. But the oaks are all still stubbornly green, and the birches are just dropping brown leaves without much effort at making themselves beautiful. There were however LOADS of rowan berries, as there seem to be everywhere this year.
The waterfall gully is very picturesque, but finding a good - safe- viewpoint is near impossible. Hence the intervening twigs, bilberries etc.
