My wife and I took a short, 7-day trip to Iceland two weeks ago. We were fortunate to have generally beautiful days to hike and photograph but the first four nights were very cloudy. On this trip, I had hoped for some nighttime imaging of either the Milky Way or the Aurora Borealis, or both. On the fifth night, after a late afternoon torrential downpour, the clouds cleared — for a time — and a sprinkling of stars began to appear. Unfortunately a full moon was due to rise around the same time dark was settling in. After grabbing a few snaps of the moon peaking over a distant mountain range, I set up a couple of cameras on tripods with fast lenses (24mm f1.8 and 35mm f/1.8) pointing in different directions: southwest and northeast. I thought perhaps the southwest setup might capture some of the Milky Way but the moon was really washing out the stars in that direction. Nonetheless, I focused the camera and set up interval shooting to run for about an hour. The second, northeast pointed camera was my Sony a7RV with a Rokinon 35mm f/1.8. After focusing, I set the interval shooting to capture 900 4-second exposures. The other settings were 1600 ISO and the aperture was at f/2.2. Then I dozed.
Not trusting Icelandic weather to not rain, or the zephyr-like winds to not blow, I was not going to have longer runs whilst sleeping. So it was well after midnight when I awoke and both cameras had completed their respective runs and I gathered the gear up and stowed it inside for the night.
The next morning I was scanning through the 1000+ images from the two runs and saw that about 3/4’s of the way through the interval shooting runs there had been some very nice northern lights activity. The beauty of capturing multiple (read: 100’s or 1000’s) of images via interval shooting is that you can process single images, or stack a small subset of images to increase the signal and lower the noise of your final image, or create a star trails image, or create a timelapse movie. The image you see here is but one 4-second frame out of the 900 captured, processed in both Lightroom and Photoshop. The link below will take you to a 37-second timelapse movie of the hour-long run. I really don’t have much interest in videos, per se, but timelapse compositions of the natural (or, even built) environments can create some stunning imagery. Watching the stars wheel, clouds blow in, satellites streak, and the aurora dance, are all pretty remarkable. I use LRTimelapse Pro 7 to process and create my timelapse movies. It’s a very full-featured application that I am just now beginning to use more often. A free demo version is available for those interested.
I hope you enjoy the short movie!
Image, timelapse and words, Jeff Clay