Aurora

This has been a good year for auroras but until last night I had never seen one.  There were two very strong showings earlier in the year but on both occasions I was away from home without the right camera or access to dark(ish) sky.  Some of the others have come and gone very quickly in the early hours and I only found out next morning, and anyway it was usually cloudy.  I had identified a field just across the road as a possible site with a view north and when the app alert showed red last night, and the sky was clear, I went across to try to get a photo.

It wasn't dramatic to the naked eye but I could see green and red lights in the sky to the north. This is roughly what it looked like to me (with a plane flying across).

And this is how the camera saw it.

As I watched the colour spread to the west.

And the red developed on the western side.

I was using a 24-70mm lens at 24mm but ideally I would have had a wider angle.  As the red intensified I tried a series of photos for a vertical panorama but the vignetting and the lack of reference points mean Adobe Lightroom can't stitch a panorama.  So here are the upper and lower photos I would have used.

Things changed quite quickly and the red began to fade.

By the time I left the sky looked like this (to the camera).

It looks from the activity plot as though the aurora was brighter again after 2am but I was fast asleep by then.  I have a few ideas how I might improve next time, perhaps using portrait aspect to make a horizontal panorama.  Otherwise I'll need a wide-angle lens.

A winter wonderland

We don't get much snow these days but there was plenty at the weekend.  Yesterday was just below freezing and was cloudy and still after further overnight snow so I took a walk through Gosforth Nature Reserve.  Every twig, leaf and branch was covered in white, every footstep crunched in a magical winter wonderland.

The Shambles

Perhaps my favourite image from the night shoot in York.  The Shambles is normally thronged with tourists but. perhaps not surprisingly, was deserted at midnight on a wet Monday in March. Click on the photo for a full view.

King's Square, York

A second photo from my night shoot in York in March.  It was a rainy night then and a rainy day today has given me time to learn to process this one, removing rain spots, etc.  Click on the photo to see large.

Through the window

The Red Borders at Hidcote Manor Garden.  iPhone

A night shoot in York

This was my first organised photography trip since the pandemic.  Prior to that I was going on one or two trips a year to learn more about landscape photography and to experience new places.  Although these outings were enjoyable I did find that up to six consecutive days of non-stop photography was a bit much for me.  I decided to restart with a couple of day trips within travelling range, although this first one was at night.  I went to York in March with Mark Banks, who I first met several years ago.  We were doing a night shoot in the city, learning to use exposure stacking with a lot of post-processing in Adobe Lightroom.  When I got home I found my old Lightroom 6 didn't do exposure merging and my ageing iMac couldn't support Lightroom Classic.  So I ended up buying a new computer to run the software to process the photos, making it a very expensive trip!  I have recently completed an on-line tutorial with Mark and here is the result of the first image of York Minster.  Click on the photo to get a closer view.

It has come at the wrong time really, with long light evenings, foxes and badgers to watch, and so much natural history photography to process.  Each of these landscape pictures is likely to take me an evening so it may be a while before I get more done but I'll post them here when I do.  A week later I went to Berwick with Mark to do abstract rock photography using focus stacking in Adobe Photoshop so there is even more to be done.

A walk in the woods at Wallington Hall