Posted December 30th, 2016

Welcome to Dawson City

Yes, this “building” is in fact a road sign which welcomes visitors arriving at the boundary of Dawson City on the Klondike Highway. Well, this view actually shows the back side of the sign which tells those who are departing “Thanks for visiting Dawson City”.
Still getting accustomed to my new camera in early September, I had not noticed that the exposure mode I had selected for this shoot was set to record JPEG rather than RAW image files, which I always choose for their much better malleability in post-processing. This is especially important for nighttime images that typically require significant adjustment of very low level dark tones and are already compromised by high ISO settings. But these K-1 JPEGs held up better than I expected, even with substantial lightening of the building/sign to lift it out of the shadows. Mind you, the brightness of the aurora and the wide aperture of the lens led me to use ISO 800, which really is not very high for this camera.
Pentax K-1, Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 UMC, 4 sec @ f/1.6, ISO 800