Aurora Australis : Camera VS Naked Eyes
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Please Watch in 1080HD ***
While observing the
Aurora Australis is a truly awe-inspiring and often breathtaking experience, the images that come out of modern day
DSLR cameras do not match what you witness in real life.
Recently i photographed many colors in the fantastic
Southern Lights (Aurora Australis) displays and has been lucky enough to observe including green, purple, yellow, orange, red, magenta and blue. But, lots of people will asked me about my experience with my naked eye,
The simplistic answer is because human eyes can’t see the relatively “faint” colors of the aurora at night. Our eyes have cones and rods – the cones work during the day and the rods work at night.
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Humans use two different kinds of cells in their eyes to sense light.
Cone cells, concentrated in the fovea in the central area of vision, are high resolution and detect color in bright light. These are the main cells we use
for vision in the daytime. Rod cells, concentrated in the periphery around the outside of the fovea, can detect much fainter light at night, but only see in black and white and shades of gray. [
Aurora] only appear to us in shades of gray because the light is too faint to be sensed by our color-detecting cone cells.” –
Jerry Lodriguss
Thus the human eye views the Aurora Australis generally in “black & white.” DSLR
Camera sensors don’t have this limitation. Couple that fact in with long exposure times and high
ISO Settings of modern cameras means the camera sensor has a much more dynamic range of vision in the dark than we do. The same thing is true regarding the
Milky Way and night photography in general.
Article reference from
Mike Taylor.
I made a time-lapse video to show what I mean. These 2 aurora time-lapse was capture on 23 June
2015 and 13 July 2015 at
Port Hills and
Lake Ellesmere ,
Christchurch New Zealand.
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TimeLapse was shooting with my
Nikon D610 +
Samyang 14mm 2.8f + Nikon 17-35mm 2.8f.
Port Hills TimeLapse Setting - ISO 800, 20sec shutter speed, 2.8 aperture, white balance - incandescent, 14mm focus length. (The light glow from the moon was very strong). The video is kinda blur for some part, cause the lens was fogged and i didn’t notice that. It became clear again after i wiped it.
Lake Ellesmere TimeLapse Setting - ISO
3200, 30sec shutter speed, 2.8 aperture, white balance - incandescent, 17mm focus length. (The place is really low light pollution, the only light source was the car passed by at the back of the road).
TimeLapse process - I process all my photos through
Adobe Lightroom CS5 and i certainly have extra “artist’s view” to the aurora scenes but the colors have not been saturated very much because
Mother Nature did that work beautifully. After process the photos, the edited photos will process in
Adobe After Effect CS6 to develop as a video. For the
Human Eyes Point of view, I desaturated the video while i compiled in
Final Cut Pro X.