The below photos were from the 2nd night of aurora watching. These should have turned out better, but I stupidly made a mistake in leaving a ND filter on my camera from some earlier in the day shots. The result is that most of these images end up being exposures on the order of 60 seconds. I don't know why I didn't think to check for that. I couldn't understand why my shots were requiring such long exposures, yet I was so caught up in the moment and it was pitch dark where I was at that I didn't try to see what was "wrong" with my camera. The lights were much brighter this night, but not bright enough to light up the surroundings. I was quite disappointed in my mistake, too as some of the dynamics and details associated with a shorter exposure were lost for this night. It wasn't the end of the world. Two nights after this, the sky put on a show that will probably be one of the most memorable I'll ever see (since we never see them in California). Those will come in a day or two.
The lit up foreground in these images is due to the guest house behind me combined with a 60 second exposure. It definitely wasn't bright enough to see anything, it just comes out when the shot is exposed for so long. All the shots were in a place called Breiđavík in the West Fjords near the famous bird cliffs at Lemantour (sp?). In September there is nothing at the bird cliffs and the Northern Lights are the primary attraction.
This image you can see what appears to be an abandoned car. I didn't even realize it was there until after I got home from Iceland and started evaluating the photos.
The following image, you can still see the hint of sunset in the sky.
Just to give an idea of how bad the ND affected things, this image had the brightest Aurora of the bunch this night. This show ended up being 115 seconds at f/3.5 and ISO 3200. I think I had a 6 stop filter on there. I must have still been jet-lagging a bit and a bit too excited. The star trails are quite apparent as opposed to the previous thread, although since these shots were all at 10 mm, they aren't that bad. Zoomed out, you can still make out URSA major quite well, and since I was shooting towards the North, the start trails are much shorter near the north pole in the sky.
THe light on the horizon in the final shot are a couple of people with flash-lights in the distance. I had a hard time keeping them from shining a light directly on my camera when they were near my tripod. They kept wanted to see my camera up close. We had a bit of a language barrier, too, but they were pretty nice.
Originally posted by GeoJerry 
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