“Soaring” by Ole Salomonsen shows the majestic Northern Lights as you’ve never seen it before!
If you haven’t been lucky enough to witness the Northern or Southern Lights with your own eyes, photographer and filmmaker Ole Salomonsen‘s Soaring is possibly the best look at this majestic phenomenon yet.
What’s so special about it? Unlike most other films featuring the aurora, Soaring is filmed in realtime and isn’t a time-lapse video. This means that what you see is essentially what the photographer saw with his own eyes while looking up at the night sky over Norway. While time-lapse videos usually feature a flickering and fast moving aurora, the real-time video shows the intricate movements, which range from a slow, constant glow, to colours and streaks of light that move so fast, even the 25 frame per second recording could not keep up with it!
In Ole’s words: “All sequences are realtime video, no timelapse used. This film shows the auroras how they really are in real world, not like in most timelapses where they flicker in ridicilous speeds over the screen. Most of the time auroras move really slow and majestically. However, occasionally when you have a strong display they may move really fast, way to fast to be reproduced by timelapse. This video contains some of the wildest auroral displays I have witness in my life in the skies over Tromsø. These displays could never have been presented as they were without realtime video. Even realtime video with framerate of 25fps is struggling to keep up at times with the fastest displays.”
The gear that makes this real-time recording possible is the new Sony A7s full-frame mirrorless camera, which has a very sensitive 12 megapixel sensor that keeps the noise down even at high ISOs. This kept exposure times short enough to film at a realtime framerate of 25fps, without having to resort to time-lapse photography. Ole ads: “The camera used for this was the Sony A7s, with various lenses. Just to answer a few questions I know will come; yes the camera is good in low light, however do not expect magic, there is still noise when you really push it. You still need to plan your shots accordingly to light-conditions.”
View more of Ole’s incredible photos on his website and Facebook page, and more of his videos on Vimeo.
Via FStoppers.
