A few nights ago my photo tour group photographed the aurora borealis from the side of our hotel. It was beautiful, as usual, but we didn't have an interesting foreground This is a picture that would be impossible to take, given the present state of technology, because a long exposure was necessary for the night sky but that would mean the horses would have to be perfectly still over the course of several seconds. That's not going to happen, so I created it. All of the Icelandic horses were photographed individually against snow. That made it easy to separate them from their original background. The technique I used was to apply the lasso tool to make a rough selection around the horse, add a lot of contrast, darken the shadows and lighten the highlights, and then copy that to the clipboard (Edit > copy). I then pasted the image into the aurora background, reduced it in size, and -- this is the secret -- I used the blend mode 'darken' from the layers palette. The white highlights disappeared, and I was left with a perfect silhouette. I then added the reflection with the Photoshop plugin 'Flood.' The settings for the sky was 5 seconds, f/4.0, and 2500 ISO. You don't want a super long exposure because the northern lights are constantly moving ,and with exposures more than 5 or 10 seconds, the definition in the abstraction becomes lost. Long exposures produce green hazes with little design.
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