DID IT REALLY LOOK LIKE THAT?

I’m often asked if my night sky photographs looked, at the time of capture, the way they do in my final images. In my previous career, latterly as an instructor in the RAF Regiment, we had a mantra; never assume knowledge. So those who know about night photography will probably skip this, but if you’ve got this far I’ll assume you don’t know much if anything about taking photographs of the night sky, and I’ll give you a brief overview of my night photography process and how night sky images finish up looking like they do. 

Of course, we’ve all seen the pictures of the multi-coloured arc of the Milky Way and the curtains, beams, and swirls of the aurora in anything from green and blue to red and rippling magenta. But as this sites’ homepage alludes to, a big attraction for me of making nighttime images the way that I do, is that you can only imagine how the final image will actually look, because no they don’t look the way they do in a photograph to the mark one eyeball.  

Unfortunately, at best, with a very bright aurora and an extreme latitude it is sometimes possible to discern a pale milky green hue and perhaps a hint of red, magenta or blue, but most of the time the aurora is light grey, usually moving to varying degrees but looking more like wispy cloud or a bank of the same on the northern horizon (or southern horizon if it’s the aurora australis). I’ve seen many auroral storms in the north of Scotland and only twice seen a faint red glow with very strong auroral storms. Indeed, one does have to wonder how many people have seen a not particularly active aurora and not even realised what they were looking at.  The Milky Way is similarly dim, and our eyes did not evolve to work in dim light. 

The fact is that it’s technology that makes these images possible.  How much detail is visible in a night sky photograph and how bright that sky appears to be is down to how the camera was set up dictated by the light conditions at the time of capture. With its long exposure function a camera can gather far more light than the human eye ever could with an aperture that can stay open for as long as the photographer wants it to, within the constraints of the equipment being used. while the varying levels of light from “light pollution” or natural ambient light including the moon state and the position of the sun below the horizon, effect the character of the sky including the colour and detail that can be seen in the final image which is dictated by how high the ISO setting needs to be set which effects in turn the cameras ability to detect colour and light (its dynamic range). But even in the darkest light pollution free place on earth, the Milky Way or the aurora do not look to the naked eye the way that we photographers so often portray them, but then neither do daytime long exposures or photographs taken in black and white, both of which can vary greatly in appearance depending on the photographer’s artistic vision.  

Don’t get me wrong, the aurora and starry skies are awe inspiring, but if you were standing at a photographer’s side at the time of capture expecting to see in the sky the vivid greens of the aurora or the well-defined dust lanes of the Milky Way that one sees on a computer monitor or in a print, you would be sorely disappointed. Unfortunately, a documentary record of what was actually visible would make for a very boring image indeed. You can see this in the comparison images below, with the image on the left, as near as possible, adjusted to look like what I saw with the naked eye. The middle image is what the camera “saw” before the file was processed into the image on the right.(with lighting added) And depending on the image there can be a lot of processing.

Getting out all the Milky Way detail that can be seen in the image below from the glaring light cast into the sky by the lights on the Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft flightline at Royal Air Force Lossiemouth (which are probably visible from Mars!) required a painstaking series of procedures before looking anything like this image, which I make no apology for. It’s the final image and the artistic vision that matters. The way I look at it is if digital makes things easier, and it does, do harder! No AI abominations though, all my portfolio images are made from genuine photographs taken by me. 

I could go in to all the technicalities of how I capture my images and why the human eye sees the night completely different to a camera but I don’t do any different to anybody else and there’s a ton of stuff already out there that covers that. But very briefly I happily “time layer” most of my foreground images, that is they’re not usually taken as a single shot. Some are lit, from any number of angles, some are not, indeed some of my favourite aurora images are not lit like the one at the bottom of the page. Skies can be anything from one to nine images which are “stacked” to eliminate noise (grain). Then all that raw material is - often painstakingly - blended to look like it would have looked if we could see the way a camera does. If an image is naturally impossible but looks good, say the Milky Way is somewhere in the sky where it would never really be, I put it into my Creative Edit gallery, although it could be argued that most of my night sky images are creative edits by dint of how they are put together.  

Since I take my foreground shots separately to the sky shots (usually) I do technically “focus stack” since the camera settings are different (usually) for both, that is a big aperture for the sky and a small aperture for the foreground exactly as one would in daylight (hyperfocal focusing) but I never focus on multiple different parts of the foreground. I use a remote control to operate the camera from anything up a 150 metres away but there’s no focus option and it’s hard enough running about in the night waving a torch around on slippery rocks or in a wood with branches threatening to take one's eyes out without constantly going back to the camera to refocus, hence the hyperfocal focusing.  

Hyperfocal focusing is the photography alchemy that means focusing “approximately” a third of the way into the scene (not at the main subject if that’s somewhere else) renders the whole scene acceptably sharp which is important if, as is the case with most of my images, the foreground elements are close to the camera where a large aperture would render those nearer elements out of focus.  Think of those flower shots where the foreground and distance are blurred but the focal point in the centre is sharp. That kind of shot is taken with a large aperture. This blurring or “bokeh” effect is fine if that’s what you’re going for and would actually be much easier to do when shooting at night because the wider aperture gets light to the sensor much faster which is handy if things are moving around a lot, which in Scotland is usually most of the time and often quite violently. I haven’t done any night stuff that way yet but I could. 

Of course, talk of blending multiple images, even ones taken at the same time, will have the photography ethics police charging their collective tasers, but the father of landscape photography Ansel Adams famously used to go back and re-shoot elements of a photograph if it didn’t come together the first time and then blend them. It’s the final image that matters. In the end it comes down to the viewer, who, as with any artform (even calling what I do an artform will send some apoplectic), is the final arbiter of what pleases their eye. Don’t like what you see, go look at something else, there’s plenty out there. I won’t be engaging in any war of words on ethics!  

All of the above is technical stuff, but how you use the tech is dictated by the artistic vision and, like many other kinds of photography, it’s a sort of “salt and pepper” thing. The aim for me, usually but not exclusively by way of those combined multiple exposures, is to arrive at a final image that couldn't possibly have been seen with the mark one eyeball. Within reason. I don’t add or remove elements that don’t fit the vision... unless it’s movable and man-made. I’m a group of injuries moving in close formation and Scotland’s weather can be troublesome to say the least meaning that the chances of getting “the shot” can be rare. So, when a couple of transiting North Sea oil platforms that were lit up like Christmas trees inconveniently anchored in the Moray Firth right below a rare auroral storm, they got “Photoshopped”, a course of action for which I make no apology. Boats can vanish too. That usually means lobster boats but once meant a cruise ship that had been on TV news earlier that day while visiting Scotland on its way to Norway on an aurora watching cruise. Ironically, I photographed it in the Moray Firth below an impressive Kp7 auroral storm. I wonder if anybody on board noticed. 

I mentioned AI above and that I “do not” use it to generate any of my portfolio images but I do use some AI tools, like AI DeNoise to eliminate the noise (graininess) that can occur in nighttime images. Since I take foregrounds and skies separately, I will always try Photoshop’s Sky Replacement tool to put in the good sky but that doesn’t always work well enough, so I end up blending the two using tedious layer masks, but the point is that none of the image is AI generated. Everything in my Portfolios was taken by me. 

So, no, unfortunately, it didn’t actually look like that - if only - though it does restore a level of mystery to the photographic process that’s been lost with the instant gratification of digital. I’ll leave it to you do decide whether that matters or not.