Iceland Aurora Blog

This photo was taken from the top of Skaftafell. This is a popular hill area near the Vatnajökul.  The climb is fairly easy and there is a road for disabled access which winds about half way up the hill. The walking route takes you though a network of beautiful waterfalls, the most notable is Svartafoss (black falls).

The walk takes you to several viewpoints where there are spectacular views over the glacier and further up the hill you will enter mountain terrain and there you are able to get onto the glacier.  This photo was taken about half way between Svartafoss and the first viewpoint.

This week’s photograph was taken on a recent night trip to Geysir.

The wind was incredibly strong and it was strong enough to blow my camera and tripod over even though it was on the shortest setting.  My other challenge was to capture the eruption of Strakkur (Geysir’s little brother).  The eruption is very brief, just a few seconds and yet my night photography technique is to expose for around 45 seconds.

What a week it has been. Twice I ventured to the mighty Jökulsárlón in the south east and spent a total of four nights on the lagoon. It was more of a challenge than I had anticipated. The cold was just one obstacle as the weather raged from a force ten gale to a snow storm to a peaceful sunrise over a perfetly still lake.

This week’s photo was taken on the beach a few hundred yards from the lagoon. The sea was rough as it lashed against the unique ice-forms that lay on the beach.

This image was taken in the late spring, but early in the morning. The sun is rising behind the great Mýrdalsjökul. I used an HDR technique to capture the detail in the farm land as well as the morning sky.

When I picked up photography again at the beginning of the year, I noticed a new style of picture. These pictures were strong in detail and had an extraordinary range of light. Some looked bloody awful, but some looked very effective… I had to give it a go.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. The human eye has a dynamic range of about 10 stops. A regular camera film or digital sensor has about half of this. The idea behind HDR is to give pictures a wider dynamic range to produce a scene that is closer to what
the eye can see. Ordinarily, if you take a sunset picture the foreground usually comes out
black although what you saw was detail in the land as well as a magnificant sky.

Technique
Take a range of exposures of the same scene to capture the whole range of light.

iso=100 f=18 0.06sec	iso=100 f=18 0.25sec
iso=100 f=18 1sec	iso=100 f=18 4sec

Software is required to combine the images together. There is a function in Photoshop CS2/3 to ‘merge to HDR’ this can be found on the ‘Edit’ menu. This will let you merge many images with different exposure to create a single image. Alternatively, there are stand-alone programs such as Photomatix which will let you merge to HDR.

Tone-mapping
Tone-mapping refers to the second half of the HDR process where you control the levels of highlight and shadow, saturation and strength of effect. This is necessary to be able to see the HDR image on a regular computer screen or printed image. Photomatix lets you do both Merge and Tone-map, and they provide a free demo that you can plug into Photoshop.

Taking the picture
To produce a successful HDR image much care is needed in the field. A tripod is almost necessary as your images have to line up perfectly. Any slight difference in the image can ruin your HDR.  Space your exposures roughly 3 stops appart. This can be done with shutter speed, iso speed or even aperture.

Vatnsnes (3), originally uploaded by hugeknot.

This abandoned farm is on the eastern side of the Vatnsnes peninsular. I think it is called Hvoll. This was taken around 6 am and I was lucky enough to have the light of the rising sun shining on the foreground while the mountain and sky behind the house remained dark and moody.

This weekend I went on a trip to Vatnsnes in the north of Iceland. I started from Hvammstangi and travelled clockwise around the peninsula. It was about 11pm when I started and so it was dark for the whole trip.

These two pictures are from the eastern side and were taken between 1 and 2 am. I stopped at  picnic spot at Hvítserkur. I was looking for a place to put up my tent without paying. The spot was far from ideal as it consited of a large, square, gravel carpark surrounded by very long wet grass.  There was a party of 4 Polish tourists who had already pitched their tents. I managed to secure a tight spot between the picnic table and bin. I erected my tent and then went for a walk with my camera and tripod.

I walked through the long grass towards the sea where I saw a fallice shaped rock reflecting in the calm seas. But there was a steep hillside leading down to the shore where I wanted to be. I used my tripod (I don’t believe in torches!) to test the ground in front of me and managed to climb down half way to a good spot.

There were northern lights flashing occassionally over head and sometimes into the scene, but I knew that my exposure would be too long to get a good aurora picture. I mounted my camera on a steady tripod and tried a  2 minute exposure on ‘bulb’. I was suprised to find a nearly black image, but then realised that I had a polariser filter on. Filters are not good for night photography, so I removed it and tried the same exposure of 2min at f=4.0 and 100iso. Results were better, but still too dark.  I waited a while. I tried a 6 min exposure with everything else the same. This gave me a completely black image. Only one explanation for this! I removed the lens cap and tried again… this time for 8 min. You can see the result below. Very nice silver sea, blood red clouds over the town lights and lots of cloud movement. Overall a pleasing result, but I realised that if I wanted to get the detail in the rocks it would probably take half an hour. This is where digital cameras have their weakness; I could not guarantee that the batteries would survive a 30 min exposure. So I didn’t try. What made this shot for me was when I noticed the sheep on top of the rock. She must have been asleep and perfectly still for 8 minutes.

Back at the picnic area, I tried a long exposure of the night sky above the tents and cars. Having learnt a bit of a lesson down at the shore, I decided to change the iso to 400 and set my camera up for a 6 min exposure. I calculated that this would be the equivalent of a 24min exposure at 100iso.  Below is the result. I just managed to get enough detail in the foreground to make it work. If Ihad thought about it, I could have dropped the iso rating at the shore to get that shadow detail.

Jökulsárlón
This week’s photograph was taken back in May this year. This was on a trip to the south east of Iceland. Jökulsárlón is literally translated as Glacier lagoon and the one bearing this name is the largest glacial lagoon in Iceland. It takes about 4 hours to drive from Reykjavik.

Jökulsárlón is located on the south eastern edge of the Vatnjökull between Skaftafell and Höfn. The area is a protected nature reserve so there is no camping permitted. There is a cafe open in mid summer and a boat ride out into the lagoon.

Grettir is one of the most famous of the Icelandic saga it decribes the life of a very strong hero who was plagued with bad luck and who seemed to be born in the wrong era.

He was born in Bjarg in the valley that leads into Miðfjörður. His father and brother were farmers, but Grettir wasn’t interested in that line of work. He was much happier with a sword in his hands than a sythe.

The saga takes the reader all over Iceland and much of Norway as he was exiled and outlawed for much of his life. He always managed to escape death either with his might as a warrior or through the support of friends who he had helped to rid of ghosts, bears or beserks.

The Ghost of Glámr
A famous part of the saga is when Grettir wrestled and killed a very nasty and powerful ghost. This ghost who haunted the farm of Þorhalstaðir in Forsaeludal, would kill horses and break every bone in their bodies (to give an idea of the spectre’s strength) as well as sheperds, other livestock and more emotively, Þorhal’s daughter.

Grettir heard about the ghost of Glámr through his uncle in Vatnsdalur. Eager to continually test his strength and courage Grettir set off for the farm at Forsaeludal.

Þorhal was very welcoming to Grettir as his strength and courage was well spoken of throughout the land. Two nights came and went without any sign of the ghost, this was unusual and suggests that Glámr knew that Grettir was there. On the third night Grettir found his horse crushed to death. He vowed to avenge the death of his horse despite Þorhal’s forebodings.

The next night, Grettir hid himself in the wrecked farmhouse and didn’t prepare for sleep. The ghost of Glámr straddled the roof of the house and kicked the roof until the wood creaked. Then he appeared at the door way. Grettir thought this guy was very ugly, but kept himself wrapped in a bear skin. Glámr found the bear skin and began to tug at it, but Grettir tugged back and betweenthem they ripped the bear skin in half.  The beast now had Grettir by the legs and was trying to pull him out of the house. Grettir held firm, but on feeling his strength waining, he played push-pull and the monster ended up on his back with Grettir on top of him.

The moon light suddenly caught the monster’s face and Grettir was haunted by his ugliness. Glámr praised Grettir for his strength and courage, but added that his eyes were going to follow Grettir throughout his life’s passage of ill fate. With that, Grettir cut off the goul’s head and placed it behind its own buttocks (common practice for killing ghosts).

The northern lights (also know as aurora borealis(north) and aurora australis (south)), are a light phenomena that have excited people for many centuries.
Generally they are visible more frequently the further north or south you are.

They are caused by solar particles emited by sun-storms which get trapped in the earth’s magnetic field.
These particles take about two days to travel from the sun and it is their interaction with
gases in the earth’s atmosphere that produces the stunning visual displays.The aurora can best be described as a curtain of light sometimes as a straight line sometimes as a spiral (corona). They are usually green, but it is the interaction of nitrogen, oxygen and altitude that can cause different colours. High altitude produces red, lower altitudes produce blue and violet. They seem to follow a pattern depending on the strength of the storm.  Often they will hold a line for a long time where you will see the occasional dance (just like a rippling curtain), then the line will start to become a bit  more random until it fills the sky above your head and dances very wildly. This is the most spectacular part of the display. Then it will revert back to the line and start to form a series of vertical lines, this indicates the end of the diplay but it could be repeated in the next hour.

To take a good picture you have to know your camera well enough to be able to use it in the dark. Generally you need the widest aperture with a fairly wide lens. I would recommend 28mm lens that has a 2.8 aperture. I have used a 50mm lens, but this was a bit limiting. If you use a film camera, choose a film with iso between 200 and 400. 800 film is too grainy, 100 film is too slow (but is great if the aurora is very bright). With digital, I usually have a 100iso setting (don’t ask me why but it works better than 100 film).You will also need a good tripod as you will need to hold the shutter open for long periods of time. Here is a rough guide to exposure times:

		ISO200	ISO400
F stop	f/1.8	18-25 sec	5-17 sec
	f/2	22-30 sec	10-18 sec
	f/2.8	40-60 sec	22-30 sec
	f/4	80-120 sec	40-60 sec

As the earth moves, a long exposure will result in star trails. This can be quite nice and you will ofen see trails on good aurora pics, but it is best to be able to control the star trails by shortening your exposure times.  With a 28mm lens, the stars will start to trail after about 60secs.  I would also suggest using the bulb setting on your camera rather than a timer
controlled by the camera. If an excellent display starts up behind you, it is good to be
able to cancel you exposure and turn your camera around.

There is more about this subject on my site Photographing the Aurora.

Photographing the Aurora