Northern Lights

I did not expect to see northern lights in my home country, as they seldom appear that much to the south. However, in the evening on 5. November was quite strong aurora reported even from Croatia! Such strong auroral activity was not seen here in decades.

Unfortunately for me, the main event exactly overlapped with rain in my area. I managed to catch a little purple color between two showers, when there was only partly cloudy for a few minutes. The rain ceased quite late when remnants of purple haze were barely visible by naked eye. I used fully open aperture at f4, high ISO at 3200, and 30 seconds exposure time.

Anyway, it was fun to try. There are weak auroras occurring few times per year, mostly visible only on long exposures and invisible for naked eye. If you want to try, there is a nice aurora prediction tool by NOAA.

Hot Air Baloon Night Glow

The professional photo shoot for new Kubíček Balloons website was a nice opportunity to play. I was not the one in charge, so I just tried various ideas. This wide angle with nicely lit castle in the background came out best.

Shooting this type of photos at dusk is not easy, because the balloon is constantly moving. This particular photo is a single shot, not HDR or stitch from several exposures. However, it took decent amount of shots to get it properly exposed and sharp at the same time. There is also a quite narrow window where both the background and balloon are well lit. Too early and the balloon is too dark against the bright sky, too late and you have just glowing bulb in the dark.

This kind of static balloons exhibition is called a night glow, when the fully inflated balloon is nicely lit by the burner’s flame.

Night Storm

Despite the fact that I did a lot of lightning photos, I’m not an active stormchaser. I’m a passive storm photographer and I simply wait for random storms coming to me. Thus I very rarely see the storm coming from the distance.

This time I got lucky and there was a very active thunderstorm, nicely visible from the distance (about 30 kilometers). The final photo is a stack of 5 photos per 60 seconds = 5 minutes exposure in total.