Seeing the Aurora has always been a must see item for me and my wife. In october 2013, i.e. this very year, we made a 2 week trip to Norway. The first week was spent in the western Fjords, while the second week was up North.
As any weather geek will tell you, Autumn is a bad time with bad weather and storms and clouds and what not. All the things which are a big impediment for aurora.
But October had other advantages
1. Solar maximum - I.e. good chance of Aurora Happening
2. Low fare and accommodation costs - Norway is the most expensive country in the world, and Oct is the "cheap" time if there is anything such as cheap time
3. Daylight + Night - Having some daylight (10+ hours actually) means you can do some sight seeing, and not be in perpetual darkness
4. Weather - Though the coasts seldom get below -5, it often goes to -10 and -15 in the interiors, and believe me, that is not comfortable. So winter requires quite a bit of weather fighting. October, not so much so.
5. Accessibility - As the snow piles up, roads can close, blocking access. Again october wins
So we went, in the off season to Norway.
We got 2 clear nights. Thats about it. Two clear nights. We had 5 nights to kill, so it meant driving 100s of kms into Finland looking for clear skies.
The sun did not dissapoint. On one of the nights we got coronal aurora as Kp levels went beyond 6. M-Class flare they said.
So why restrict to a picture, when you can shoot hundreds. So with the trusty D7000 and the Tokina 11-16 firing away, I got 40GB + RAW files.
Processing, resizing, scripting.... countless hours.. many attempts later I created the video. The song of the Sun
Before we go to the video itself here are some tips I can offer
Shooting1. Shoot more, not less
I shot some sequences with only 60-70 pics. Nogo. Make sure you have 150 pictures/session. This will allow you to have 10 second segments at 15fps, which is the minimum required(wasn't that 24p you may ask?). Well 24p is good, but clouds and stars and Aurora does not move too fast if you take care
2. Crank up the ISO. Your target should be a decent shot with only 10s of exposure. Too long an exposure and Aurora Blurs.
You will get only green sky with Aurora. See the pic attached to this post. Do not worry too much about noise. You will anyway resize pic to 1980x1080 which means good leeway in terms of noise
3. RAW RAW RAW - I cannot stress this enough
Post processingRAW is very important, because your camera will get the color wrong.
1. Choose one image out of a session. Do all your settings on it and then apply to all the images. All images must have the same settings
2. High contrast. Remember, you are video graphing, not shooting, so high contrast artifacts fail to matter
3. Saturation - Again, high
4. white balance - Choose "camera" and then start tweaking the sliders. Its subjective what you want
Video ProcessingIf possible use non linear tools like avisynth etc., I use virtualdub with avisynth as this allows me to do a lot of work like dissolving clips seamlesly, overlaying subtitles etc., If you use something like a windows live movie maker, first create individual videos of your clip using virtualdub and save as "uncompressed". This way when you re-edit in a tool like windows live movie maker, there is no issue with re compression
So finally, let me get to the final item. the video itself.
I made the mistake of less pictures. This means I had to go 10fps then reencoded to 24p. So the cloud sequence appears jerky. Hopefully, I will not repeat this mistake.
Over 2000 RAW images were using in this video, or as I said earlier, 40GB of data!
Hope you like it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
