Prairie House

I Had this idea for a while about this location but the weather was really not cooperating for last couple of months. Finally a window of 4-5 hours of clear sky on a moonless night and a night that I am off from work. Got on the location early to get best possible composition before it gets dark. This might seam dumb but when you live as far north as 50th parallel it is hard to get the north star in the frame without using ultra wide angle lens. Now when you use ultra wide angle lens all kinds of weird stuff happen with object that are not in the centre of the frame. So after trying all kinds of focal length between 14mm and 35mm somewhere around 24mm with a slight tilt upwards seemed most interesting without including some things that that were close to the building but I didn't want in the frame, and I still had the north star in the upper left corner. When I finally set up it was about 35-40 min after sunset. I started to shoot single frames for the foreground while there was still available light. After I set the camera to shoot 30 sec exposures for 2 hours at 400 ISO and aperture of 5.6. This might seem very low but trust me, with the technique I had in mind for the edit this was perfect recipe. Most frames looked to dark with a star here and there in the sky and the building completely dark blending in the the darkness of the trees. I didn't want to many stars to appear in the frame because after combining that into a star trail photo it would just look to busy. For the interior I used big flashlight with tungsten bulb to get that nice warm colour. Same light was used to light parts of the grass, left and front side of the building. This was all done while camera was doing its 2 hour job. After I was done light painting I just moved back and sat in my car to avoid being eaten by hungry blood suckers. About half an hour later there it was, something I didn't expect at all, aurora borealis. Even though I checked aurora forecast before leaving home to make sure the northern lights will not ruin my star trails (which has happened few times before) you still never know when and where it will be active. With ruin I mean that all other times I would abandon my project and go on tho shot aurora instead. This time I just took out the chair from the trunk and sat outside to enjoy the show. It was going on for about 45 min then it stopped for about an hour and reappeared after I was done with 2 hours exposures. Somewhere in the middle of the shoot there was a car that passed by and I was 100% sure it will ruin everything. As lucky as I could be it actually helped shine some light on the trees which made final photo even better. Aurora was very beautiful and active from my standpoint but from camera view it was behind the trees so as it appears in the final photo. The technique used to edit was to open all pictures as layers in photoshop and change blend mode to all of them but bottom layer to lighten. I tried few different techniques but for this particular image this one looked the best. What this does it reveals all light pixels in the image and hides all of the dark ones. For this reason I was under exposing each frame by about 1 stop. This was a night shoot and the picture I wanted was to look like it was shot at night.