home Aurora over the Klondike Highway

great image... another fine posting, Mike

Mike, it doesn't get much better than this. I don't see any star trails, and so I assume that the exposure was not very long. The dipper seems small enough to make me think that you must have taken this with a pretty wide lens.

 

On top of which you have done this with an old SRT-101 and Fuji 200 film. I am glad that the digital age seems to have gone right by you and your trusty Minolta.

 

I frankly wish that you had put this one up for ratings so that more people would notice it.

 

--Lannie

Thank you Lannie for the compliments.

 

This image was created with a wide lens... 28mm and about a 20 second exposure. In general, I try to keep my aurora photos short enough so that the stars appear as points. With wide lenses, I can usually expose anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds and pull it off.

 

This photo is actually posted twice in my portfolio. The copy in my "Nocturnes" gallery was put out there for comment and rating, and was very generously received.

 

Thank you for stoping by and commenting.

 

Mike

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Congrats Mike -- this is an extremely awesome photo and I am sure is beautiful framed. I am guessing this is not with a DSLR but 35mm negative film? The Big Dipper, the aurora, the highway, mountains, and clouds make this a very rich image. Well done technically and superbly composed. It looks "old" -- like a photo from 10-15 years ago.

I really like this shot. The composition is done well with the road leading up to the mountains with that beautiful sky. The green auroras along with the blue of the sky and those tack sharp stars. The only things I find distracting are the bright yellow lane markers and the back of the sign on the left side of the road. Great image, love the dipper above the road.

So many things make this an exceptional photo - diagonal arrangement of the aurora, sharply defined stars, recognizable constellation (to a novice like me), but the presence of the earthbound elements (road, mountains, etc.) is the most important, I think. The road adds depth, and the appropriate exposure of the lower half of the photo creates balance. I could look at this one all day.

So many thanks for the honor, and the kind and thoughtful feedback. This particular image was a bit of a departure for me, as I usually make an effort to avoid man-made features in my landscape images. But the depth that the road created in this composition was too good to pass up.

 

This image, like most all of my photos, was created with film. This photo was made back when I was shooting 35mm, and now I'm shoot almost exclusively with 120 medium format. The cold temperatures I work in renders battery dependent equipment useless in a matter of minutes. I like the dependability and simplicity of all manual film cameras. In this photo, the nearly full moon provided an amazing amount of detail to the landscape, even though this was shot in the middle of a long Alaskan night. But even with the bright moon, the aurora was still brilliant enough to outshine everything else in the sky. I was especially pleased that the moon didn't exclude the Big Dipper from being recorded. The exposure was about 20 seconds with a 28mm lens at f/2.8. If I exposed much longer, the stars would have begun to perceptively trail.

 

Many thanks again for the recognition. The number of talented photographers and outstanding images here on PN is amazing.

 

Mike Klensch

What an opportunity offered itself and you made the absolute best of the situation. I really cannot offer any improvements under the circumstances of what was available. I do have a few items which I wish had been different. I wish you had been on an old rocky gravel road rather than the painted paved one at hand. I wish your wide angle lens included enough of the scene to show Polaris, the North Star. (I think you should clone away or darken the sign reflectind so much light at the left of the road.) I wish I had been with you and had made the shot.

 

My hartiest congratulations on having been chosen this week and I congratulate you on a great image.

 

As an aside, the last time I saw a sky like this was in January way back in 1954, flying in an unheated C-54 circling for nearly four hours, attempting to make a landing in central coastal Greenland and unable to get our wheels down. I took no photographs. Never even gave it a thought. I guess I'm not a real photographer at heart.

 

Willie the Cropper

Congratulations, Mike. I'm sitting here wondering how bright everything actually appeared to the naked eye without the time exposure. I am assuming that the aurora and landscape did not look quite this bright in reality. Is there anything that you can compare it to for those of us who have not seen this kind of phenomenon with our own eyes?

 

I love the perspective here, but I also love the more "natural" shots in your folder as well.

 

--Lannie

Hi Mike. This is the first time i post a comment on a POW. Your image is splendide, grandiose. It remind us the beauty of nature and the necessity to preserve it. And, as the shutter speed fixed at 20 seconde, we certainly need to take our time when watching at the sky. Congratulations !

 

Cheers, Ahmed.

When first looking at this image I saw the Aurora and a road. I've seen them before, both in real life and in photographs. Passed it on for something better I thought. But then something struck me, the composition of this image is not special or original, but it delivers a very obvious point strikingly well:

 

No matter how enormous the landscape or how great the man-made structures or architectures, space will always come back with the rediculously crushing truth that we, our planet and our efforts, really are quite insignificant in comparison.

 

(Not to be depressingly pessemistic, I love it, and I do think we earthlings are great, but space far exceeds us ;))

 

What I think is the reason, we have a contranst between things that we know is huge, like those mountains in the background and a long road (we all know it's a few steps between those yellow lines), and the aurora which is quite a bit larger than all other things in the photograph. That makes the point for me, contrast, our reality versus the reality of space, we all know that that aurora is pretty small anyway!

 

Cheers

 

// Richard

Magnificent!!!

 

In regards to the ~20 second exposure time, you wouldn't want it to be too long, for the fact that you're sitting in the middle of the road lol. I take it, that it's not a busy stretch of highway?

Very cool and well done. I also like it with the bottom cropped off to the middle of the second line on the road. This makes the sky a much larger portion of the images, which admittedly changes the meaning of the image considerably, but I think it is also an interesting approach, making the sky more clearly the main subject and the mountains and landscape less so.

Once again, thanks to you all for the feedback and advice. You all are a wellspring of ideas and encouragement :)

 

Lannie... you are right about the image appearing brighter than what the scene actually looked like to your eye. The long exposure does build up the light... I would guess that the image is about a third again brighter than it would have appeared to your eye at that moment.

 

Troy... I can understand your concern about standing in the middle of a road for too long. But, during the late fall and winter, I'm usually the only "traffic" this road ever sees. I could literally lay out in the middle of the road and sleep till morning and not worry about getting run over. There is another image in my portfolio composed while standing in the middle of this road, (and includes a bridge in the foreground), where I did a 3 hour star-trail photo. No worries about traffic :)

 

Mike

Hm, there is not much to discuss here. You got excelent depth along the road, toward mountains and in the same time excelent height with aurora on the top of the photo. You caught great atmosphere with perfect composition and that is it. Excelent. Congratulations.

As living in the other side of the world, I have never saw this phenomenon, so I don't know how bright or darker it is in reality, I can evaluate only what I see here, and it is an impressive composition with the road leading to the vanishing point in the mountains and my imagination is taking me toward the phenomenon behind those mountains..I like the sraigth line with the yellow signs of the road , the brown softer mountains lines vs. the real soft green abstract of the Aurora. Added are the pointed stares of your long exposure. Congratulation Mike, interesting POW.

I think this is a very beautiful shot, and the clarity is to be applauded. I've never had the fortune to see this with my own two eyes, so thank you for a wonderful shot to help me see a little bit of it through your eyes. Great composition!

Regards,

Amanda

This is one of natures most beautiful light shows and you have done a fine job of capturing it. Your portfolio is a marvelous display of this scene that not many of us get to see, or know how to photograph even if we do see it. You make it look easy, though, when it takes some thought and preparation.

 

I think you should have continued with your idea of not including man-made objects in this landscape. I think there is too much road. For me, it detracts from the lights.

 

Once, a long time ago I read somewhere that a proper landscape did not include man made objects. I wonder if this rule still applies for landscapes that are judged in camera clubs or in contests, or by photo editors for wilderness magazines.

Hi M.M.

 

Your comment (and mine) about man-made objects in landscape images is one that has been endlessly debated. My personal preference is to not include them in most situations, because for me, the natural/unalter land is most appealing. But certainly for others, the human touch and presence is also appealing. Regardless if you find that human touch (intrusion) appealing or not, it is certainly significant and has much to say about who we are and what we value. This alone makes it worth documenting and recording as part of the land's "story". But for me personally, it's just not a story that I am much interested in telling or promoting. Kudos to those who do, because it is an important story.

 

Mike

I'm fascinated by human creations (I don't know if a road can really be considered as a "creation" from the artistical point of view) and their interactions in natural environments. This shot is perfect (or very close to) in many ways. From the technical point of view there is nothing to complain about, perhaps some lack of sharpness due to the film used, but I'm sure that grain is perfect on a print. Exposure is very good, colors are stunning and the composition is strong. The yellow dashes make the link between the two universes and this is meaningful for me. Congrats for this excellent photograph.

Mike - fabulous. For some silly reason, I thought you were a digital man. I think I assume each person with photographs too beautiful to be real has to be using a digital camera and manipulating them some way. This is only because I can't photograph landscapes to save my life and don't know how you and others like you do it so incredibly. That sounds really pompous on my part - if I can't do it, nobody can! But, it's true nonetheless. I'm excited to comment on the road - ok, not so much the road, but the yellow lines. Of course the road draws us in, but the yellow lines add a beautiful contrast to the blue sky. This could be a textbook example of contrasting colors for Photo 101. It adds so much to the photo. I'm impressed that the road seems a neutral gray. So many times, the pavement will have a blue hue because of the reflections of the sky, but this doesn't and I like it. Telling you that I'm not very observant might just cancel out all the good I'm trying to do, but I didn't even notice the road sign until I read it in one of the comments above. Now I'm bugged I read the comments!! I also love the red on the mountain in the center. The colors here are fabulous. I don't get caught up much in the meaning behind the heavens verses the earth or nature verses creations of man; I just like taking in beautiful photographs and this is one of those photographs I could absorb all day! Beautiful work Mike.

 

Mandy

This is really something. Incredible balance of color and composition. I understand you sentiments about the use of man-made objects as I too am somewhat of naturalist but sometimes it is the one thing that pulls the picture together. Good work.