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Hi from the north of Norway

Arctic FineArt

By Arctic FineArt
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Arctic FineArt

Arctic FineArt

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Hi,

I have been out to photograph the Northern Lights and I thought it might be fun to combine this with startrails. So I went out with my 2 Sony cameras and put the A99 on the tripod to shoot a timelapse while the A99 Mark II was keeping me busy for 3 hours to do something in the meantime.

 

So now I have about 350 photos with the stars and the Northern Lights in different shape and I am trying to make a startrail shot from it. I have Lightroom and Photoshop (both latest version) and at the moment I am trying Sequator to see if I get it stucked. I have no clue about startrails so this is just a try and error, learning new things.....

 

I gonna try and read my way through the forum and see if I can find a hint on which software / workflow to use to make the startrail work with the different shapes of Northern Lights in it.

 

Best Kai

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Demonperformer

Demonperformer

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Hi, AF, and welcome to SGL.

There is software for producing a star trails image - I'm sure you will find it with a search in the "widefield" section. I'm trying to visualise exactly the result you want. Are you after a video of the moving aurorae over a background of your startrail image? I wonder if that is something for a video editor package. There are some free ones on the internet (VSDC springs to mind), but I don't know if that would be able to do this.

It will be interesting to see your final result.

Enjoy the journey.

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Arctic FineArt

Arctic FineArt

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Hey,

thank's for the welcome. I think I want the Aurora and the Startrail like a overlay over the photo. I have done a lot of timelapse stuff and I am sure this 350 photos will become a timelapse as well but I want to try out something new. Would be cool to have the timelapse run and on the end of the video it shows the Aurora (must be an average intensity) with the startrail as a photo. 

 

Well always good to set yourself a challenge ?

 

Best Kai

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Ruud

Ruud

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Hi Kai, I've never tried what you are planning, but I have an idea.

You'd need to remove the aurora from all images except one, on which you should leave it intact. Then you stack all 350 images and you have trails & one aurora.

You could try making an action that removes the aurora from an image. You'd apply the action using a batch operation on all images and save the results in a separate folder. Say you want the aurora from image 300 with the stars from all the others. In the folder with aurora free images, replace the aurora free image 300 with the original image 300, which still has the aurora.

To stack the 350 images that result you should probably use the blend mode Lighten. Again record an action and use a batch operation that adds one image after the other as a layer with blend mode Lighten. Flattens the image before adding each new one as a layer to prevent using too much memory. You may need a script to do this. (I never tried scripts, only actions and batch operations.)

 

One way I would try to make an image aurora-free would be with a B&W adjustment layer, using the blend mode luminosity. This way you make specific colours (the aurora) go black. I suspect there may be betters options

 

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Arctic FineArt

Arctic FineArt

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Hei,

regarding Northern Lights and locations I could talk weeks. But here are some basics which are most important:

 

Go and check the weather which means how many snow, clouds, rain etc. you usually have at which time of the year for this particular location. For Norway you can do that here:

https://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Troms/Tromsø/Tromsø/almanakk.html

 

Then the next thing is are you in the Aurora belt or close to ? For example going to Svalbard / Spitzbergen does not improve your changes to see the Northern Lights as you are in fact to far north same goes the other direction.

For Norway I can say go to Tromsø and you are almost 100 % safe if you come to the right time of year. Plan on having a rental car and at least one week to photograph.

 

The attached pdf has some general tipps to keep in mind when shooting in cold conditions again this is all not new but maybe good for the planning process. If you want to come to my area (Lofoten / Vesterålen) let me know

I am always up for a trip to shoot nice footage. The company mentioned in the pdf does not exist anymore so no hidden advertisement here.

 

Photo Tipps for the extreme cold in Svalbard.pdf

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Arctic FineArt

Arctic FineArt

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Ok, so just deleted it all .... was not happy with the editing the timelapse photos and the others where all mixed up the first timelapse vide had 19 GB and ..... all nonsens. So back to where we came from SD cards. So might take some time before I have something to show here ?

 

Here is the 19 GB timelapse but again there are many things to improve 

 

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