Aurora borealis over the Brooks range mountains and the James Dalton Highway, Alaska. Canon 1Ds Mark III, 24mm f/1.4L II, 8 secs @ f/1.4, ISO 1000
My employee and I are currently undertaking the colossal task of sifting through 40,000 images, removing those which are no longer relevant in the stock photo market, doing QC on keywords, upgrading all digital files to the latest LR3 processing algorithms, and cleaning the hideous dust demons. Did I already say this is a colossal endeavor? While it is painstakingly tedious, and a bit overwhelming, the end result will be a much improved series of files that will be going on a new website hopefully to be launched by the end of the first quarter. Amidst the robotic task, it is a walk down memory lane and I’ve rediscovered some photos well buried in the numerous folders. I thought I’d share one of these aurora shots taken last year. For those who live in Alaska and listen to radio broadcasting, it seems that weekly there are road closure and warning reports issued for various locations along the Dalton Highway (or Haul road). Winter can make for a treacherous drive at times. But in the dark winter skies, imagine cruising down the road with this northern view out your front windshield.
I took this picture at a small turnout, looking north to northeast, which is a common region of the sky where the aurora appear in these northern latitudes. The time was 12:26am in late March, just one of those sleepless nights chasing this magical phenomenon. I can’t remember the exact temperature but I recall somewhere in the vicinity of minus 10 to 20 degrees.
What a tough job! Some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, a great eye and touch for capturing it, and an appreciation for letting us all view it. Now the tough part of reviewing the images. It not all just the fun part!
A thought for you during this process, might be to document some of the methods used to go through the images and log some of the workflow you use. This is something I constantly struggle with, which makes me feel like I will never get through the processing of images.
Good luck and great work!
Walt, Thanks for the compliments and you have a good idea. Once the dust settles on this project, I will share some of the final protocol (since its always evolving) of this epic editing and workflow task. Stay tuned.
Awesome shot. I am wondering, if you can give me what camera setting should I have if I were to take shot similar to that. I have Nikon D40. Your help is highly appreciated.
Rob,
If you are shooting at f/2.8, your exposure would be 32 seconds at ISO 1000, which is essentially twice as long as the f/1.4. However, there are many factors that play into an accurate time. You might want to search my site here for aurora, as I’ve written about some of those issues, and have an article on my website which may be of value http://alaskaphotographics.com/how_to_photograph_northern_lights.shtml
Definitely one worth sharing! Good luck on your project!
Thanks Michelle, I’ll take that good luck wish to heart!
Patrick,
I am so blest to be the observer on the sidelines as I watch your work unfold in the majestic mystery of Nature.
Living with Parkinson’s in my own twilight time, I do research for Orphan as the Prophetic Voic, focusing on the orphan program through the Methodist church in Mozambique. A couple of things go on: You know MOZ is as hot as Alaska is cold so the contast catches me in the middle which is wonderful! The other is this: tremors have reduced my exterior hard drive to shambles months ago, and last month the same with my laptop — resulting in their setting up a 26 inch wall mount and a wireless keyboard and a distant hard drive which makes me less dangerous hopedfully. In that setting comes the opportunity to enjoy even more your Alaskan art!!without sound and movement (which increase tremors) so how much better can it get! And, I am forwarding your site to a contact in California who does excellent work in this same field. I advocate for such art to make its way to airport jetways and such, to retirement centers, therapy areas, healing centers and hospice settings. Many rich blessings for `11. c/
Carolyn,
Many thanks for your kind comments, and I do know the heat of the Mozambique sun! I’m glad you are enjoying a visit to Alaska through my photography and I wish you the best as well in 2011. Thanks for visiting.
Patrick,
Thank you very much for your response and the link to the article. My camera does not have ISO 100 setting, or maybe I am not seeing it. I will double check. Thank you again.
Rob,
I meant ISO 1000 not ISO 100
Patrick,
Your photography takes my breath away. REF: “Aurora borealis over the Brooks range mountains and the James Dalton Highway, Alaska. Canon 1Ds Mark III, 24mm f/1.4L II, 8 secs @ f/1.4, ISO 1000; Categories: Arctic, Aurora borealis, Landscapes.” Thank you for displaying your work and allowing us to enjoy it through the Internet.
Hutzely,
You are very welcome!
Awesome!! Next time when the forecast is good, I will head north to Talkeetna or may be Denali. Thank you, Sir, for all your help.
Gorgeous photo! Best wishes on your current endeavor! I can’t imagine having to do what you are doing… It’s fun enough to trek all over the state and take the photos, building up the size of your portfolio. But when you have to process and manage them, that’s a different story.
I’ve been working on a photography portfolio site/blog for the past few months. Yeah, it’s taking a long time. I wanted to build a website, and instead of using a configurable package I decided to use this as on opportunity to learn web programming. It was quite tedious, but I’m almost done (too bad, just when I was just starting to feel confident programming!).
You might not be able to get out as much, but I’m enjoying these older photos nonetheless!
Eli,
I think your endeavor at learning some code is a good one. I’ll be anxious to see your site when it is up and running. Have you been learning CSS also? I’ve found that to be one of the most helpful time investments in the coding process. Largely because of the visual control it offers. Let me know when the site is live as I’d enjoy looking. This hideous file sifting task is best taken in very small bites, but slowly, it is coming along.
Yes, I did learn CSS. I learned HTML first, then CSS, Javascript (including the jQuery javascript library and AJAX), PHP, SQL and various XML technologies. I’m working on Ruby on Rails and Java right now. It took me about a year of very motivated studying to get this far. I built the backend (login system, CMS) of my website using PHP and MySQL databases. It’s amazing what PHP can do- wordpress’s backend is written in PHP!
CSS is also extremely valuable. Although it does not add any functionality, the CSS styles are a huge factor in what makes people like or not like a website. I don’t know how familiar with CSS you are, but I find this site extremely helpful for reference when I’m modifying or adding to my stylesheet. It has basically every CSS property documented.
I’ll definitely let you know when the website is launched! As for the next couple weeks, I will be finishing the project and knocking bugs out of the code…
Eli,
I’m impressed at your initiative. You have gone much further than me in the world of code. I’m familiar with the CSS website reference you listed, it’s a great one. And, the slow passing of IE6 can not be celebrated enough. Excellent motivation and attention to detail is required in your endeavor. Can’t wait to see your site.
You could make that comment on IE6 again! I have a special alert for IE6 users. 🙂 One the things I hope to accomplish with my site is to get people to use Opera Web Browser. It is an incredible web browser, even though it only has 2.5% of the web browser market share. I think if it had more exposure, it would be fighting for the top place (and IE and FF would be at the bottom). Studies have shown it to be at (or nearly at) the top of the list of browsers for security and speed. It has excellent support for contemporary/future web technologies and standards. It can easily be adjusted easily to suit your needs/wants with widgets, addons and custom skins and buttons. It can even manage your emails, feeds, newsgroups and bookmarks. All of this, and the download package is 8MB (that’s the complete installation package)! All other browsers I’ve downloaded are about 35MB, and they don’t do as much. It runs fast, too. OK, that sounded sort of like an advertisement. But that’s because it has impressed me so much!
Eli,
I’m familiar with Opera, although I have not used it much. If you view my website in Opera, some of the Javascript functions don’t work, like the stacked image features, and sort options. Not sure why, but for that reason, I’ve nixed it. Chrome is good but I’ve favored FF for the web developer plug in. Have you used that? There might be an equivalent for other browsers but I have not scoped them out.
I use firebug all the time. It is a great tool. Opera has a developer add-on called Dragonfly, but the disadvantage of it is that you must be connected to the Internet to use it. Most of my website development is done offline so I use firebug. Actually Safari has a nice developer console too. I use it sometimes. You can get an add-on for IE called debugbar, but it is not as good as the other browsers’ developer consoles.
I have never had anything that doesn’t work in Opera, but that works in other browsers. Opera is usually extremely forgiving. All of your sort options (vertical/horizontal, Alaska only, results perpage) work just fine in Opera. I don’t see any image stacks, as you said. Both FF and Opera give me syntax errors because you used the “Language=Javascript” attribute for some of your script tags. It is deprecated. Actually, most browsers these days accept just a tag with no other attributes, but you can use type=”text/javascript” just to be safe. I think there are several things in your script that could be updated. I noticed that there were special compensations in your script for Opera 7, IE 4 and Netscape, all very ancient browsers. That led me to pop a sample search page into the W3C HTML validator. It returned 521 errors and 37 warnings. That might explain some of the issues you’ve been having with Opera… Many of the errors are probably easy fixes like removing “language” attributes from script tags. In fact, you may be able to remove entire scripts that have to do with IE 4, Opera 7 and NS (But don’t remove them unless you have a backup file in case something goes awry). Many of the errors in the validator are from un-encoded characters in your links. I doubt that that is extremely important as browsers usually encode the unencoded characters automatically. But there are several more serious errors like unmatched tags. Also some attribute names are not followed by an “=” sign. Additionally, your “openbrowser.js” file has tags within the file. “.js” files should not have tags in them since it is already understood that they are JavaScript. As I said before a lot of these are just minor, easily fixed errors with possibly major consequences.
Beautiful image Patrick. I sure do like driving the Alaska road system in the winter. I can drive for an hour or two and not see another vehicle…could be a curse too, but I like the solitude.
Thanks Mike,
I totally agree about the solitude and sense of liberty and space on Alaska’s highways – especially in winter.
Thank you for those pictures of the Northern Lights _ We lived in the Interior for approximately 45 years and still grow misty eye’d over pictures of them. How can I get some of these pictures that I can include on one of those digital picture frames in my house? We miss Alaska soooo much!!!!