spider72

Thanks again guys.

Thanks guys, glad you like it. It's a single exposure leemanley, 30 seconds, ISO3200, f/2.8, Canon 7D with Sigma 10mm diagonal fisheye lens.

International Dark Sky Week, 20 - 26 April 2014. Are you celebrating ? Here is mine small contribution. Talmine Bay, Sutherland, Scotland (21/04/14) A little bit of light pollution on the left due to aurora, which is of course acceptable kind of light pollution - at least for me anyway .

Nice shot Gordon. We almost met last night. I didn't want to approach strangers in the darkness , I realized that one of the lights which I have seen in the dark could be yours when I've seen car similar to yours on the car park on the way back.

Thanks again.

Thanks guys .

Thanks you again guys .

Thank you again guys for your kind comments.

Thanks Gordon. Yes I think we might have, it was a busy night with a lot of people admiring the show, there was like 6-8 cars on Dunnet Beach Car Park when I was shooting corona and it was already about midnight.

Thanks guys, glad you like it .

Just a wee reminder of awesome show from last week. Best to watch in HD on full screen.

In both of my shots above settings were ISO 1600, f/3.5, 18mm, 20 seconds exp. I shot this with my old camera Canon 1000D which has max. ISO of 1600. I would recommend you to shoot with ISO 3200 to get shorter exposures as auroras are sometimes really fast and with too long exposure you will lost some details. Set ISO 3200, f/3.5, 18mm and make trial exposure of 10 seconds and then adjust exposure for longer or shorter depends on the result of trial shot. Generally exposure will depends on brightness of auroral display and on Iceland they might have really wide range so you may be changing exposures many times depends of aurora activity and brightness.

I agree with Space Ranger. If you want to buy a lens for aurora shots or Milky Way / star fields shots go for fast wide angle lens, you will not get too much sky/aurora with 50mm lens and you need to remember that longer the lens focal length, less time for exposure before stars will start to trail, so fast aperture of 50mm is mitigated by shorter exposure time. Every wide angle lens with f/2.8 aperture will be fast enough with your camera (able to shoot with ISO 3200) to catch auroras and Milky Way because you will be able to use much longer exposure time. Unfortunately, you will not buy fast wide angle lens for £150 at least not a new one, I can recommend you mentioned above Tokina 11-16mm, which is really good lens for the price http://www.digitalrev.com/product/tokina-at-x-116-pro/Mjk5Mw_A_A . If you can't afford it now before you go to Iceland then just use your 18-55 kit lens at f/3.5 and 18mm it's not bad lens after all, below pictures of aurora which I've shot with this kit lens, first one from Scotland, second one from Iceland.

Thanks, landscapes and auroras are my business ... .

In most cases I use value between 40-75 for luminance noise (40 for brighter pictures like auroras, higher values for darker like Milky Way shots) and almost always value of 75 for colour noise. To bring detail back I use quite high value of "sharpening", from 65 to 90 and then "masking" feature (from 25 to 70 depends on the shot) on top of that to avoid bringing noise back when sharpening. I hold "Left Alt" key when doing this (moving "masking" slider), to see what will be sharpened and what will be not, whites represent sharpening areas, black areas will be not sharpened, so you can regulate how much details you want back keeping "bringing back" noise at bay.