Odds and Ends

The Northern Lights were active in February of 2014. Especially on the 18th and 19th nights of the month they put on an impressive show over my area in the southern Yukon, the likes of which I don’t believe I had ever seen before and certainly had not photographed previously. The hours I spent capturing this display yielded about 100 images and most of them are satisfying. In fact, overall I am delighted with the images almost as much as I was thrilled by the spectacle of the auroral event itself.

And so it was that I feel compelled to present this gallery and show my record of this awe inspiring natural phenomenon to others who were not privileged to experience it first hand. To be clear, the photos cannot reproduce the experience of being there.  This highly active aurora was often full of rapid motion and undulating brightness and that was a big component of the spell it cast. Sequential series of images might give some sense of that movement but it is a very abstract interpretation. The main effect is undesirable blurring of the light patterns during the necessarily long exposures. But with those long exposures, the camera does record things that are too dim to be visible to the human eye. I have further boosted the tonal relationships with adjustments in Adobe Lightroom. The result is still a credible representation of what I saw at the time of exposure, but a somewhat enhanced representation that reflects my photographer’s vision of it.

Currently this gallery only contains photos from the two nights I have described here. I anticipate that I may evolve it into a more general gallery of my Aurora Borealis photography, adding some of my better past and future images of the subject and perhaps removing some of the more redundant existing ones.

View the Aurora Extraordinare gallery here.

I have just posted a new gallery,  Road Trip 2012 , which is a collection of photographs I took during a motorcycle trip to the Okanagan last August. Yes, it has been a long time coming ... and indeed, a long time since I last added any gallery to this site.
My previous galleries have been Flash based and I wanted to move away from that format given its widely maligned performance and security issues and declining ubiquity of support. But I was insistent about not giving up the functionality my flash galleries provided and especially about being able to still integrate galleries into this site such that they look and feel like they belong and retain full navigation. JavaScript was the fairly obvious way to go but I had difficulty identifying a specific application that would meet my requirements. After trying and abandoning a couple, I have settled on jAlbum with the Matrix skin.

Matrix is rich in features, including display of select EXIF data and linking to Google Maps from geotagged images, and it allows considerable customization of layout and style. Still, even after I had figured out how to harness the myriad options within the interface, I had to code many inline styles and make a few edits to output files to get close to what I really wanted. I also had to design a new, flexible, wide page with top navigation to contain the gallery and suitably integrate it into this website. The result is not perfect but I am generally satisfied with it.

The gallery is embedded in its web page using an iframe, which creates a couple of issues though it is only really a problem if you are viewing on a small, low resolution display. In that case, when images need to be reduced in size to fit within the browser viewport, the iframe prevents proper resizing. If you run the browser in full screen mode or at least with all toolbars hidden, a minimum screen height of 764 pixels should be adequate if a bit clunky to use. In case this is not satisfactory or the gallery is not displaying properly in the iframe for whatever reason, I have included a link at the bottom of the page which will open the bare gallery outside of the container page. Then resizing should occur properly, though a limitation of the matrix skin with my placement of captions below the photos may still result in unsatisfactory display of vertical images.

Now that I have produced this gallery it should serve as a template for me to much more easily and quickly create other new galleries. Stay tuned.

With the addition of a new gallery, I have also rebuilt the main  Galleries  page that indexes all the galleries. This page had been a remnant of antiquated html code without css styles and structured around my original ill-advised choice of html frames architecture. I have employed the flexible, wide page format I designed for the new gallery for this page also.