Last week, I tried something in photography I had had in mind for quite a while. I had seen several examples of photomontages of the midnight sun, and I had sworn to myself that, someday, I would make one of my own. And what better location than Svalbard and its amazing landscapes to give it a try?
I am not going to make a whole tutorial about how to do this, since there are already plenty of them online and I am far from being an expert. But I can just give a few tips and explain how I did that.
So, first of all, I had to hope for ideal conditions, namely a cloudless sky, at least on the whole northern horizon. And in Longyearbyen, it does not happen that frequently, as there are often clouds in that precise direction. The night between Thursday 7 and Friday 8 May turned out to show optimal conditions, so I decided to take the chance and stay awake!
I chose a spot with a nice view and – lazily – by walking distance to the student housing where I live. In other words, I set up my tripod on the emergency staircase of the building, at about 15 seconds from the kitchen and nearly twice as much from my room. Then, all I needed was to take a picture every 15 min, keeping the camera settings exactly the same to get the slight dimming as the sun got lower above the horizon. I chose an aperture of f/13, an exposure time of 1/320 s and ISO 100. I took pictures from 22:00 to 03:15, changing the field of view of the camera only once, at 00:45.
Once I had all the pictures came the assembling part. Given that with 15-min time resolution the sun's images would almost have merged with each other, I kept only every other image in the montage. I made a single exception in order to include the image taken at 02:45, when the sun briefly reappeared between the two mountains, on the right side of the image.
The montage itself was much more simple than I expected. Using Photoshop, I simply superimposed the images in chronological order and associated a mask to each of the layers, with increasing transparency so as to reveal a greater and greater portion on the left side of the underlying image. In other words, the background image was the first one (taken at 22:00), and the top layer the last one (taken at 03:15). To make the transition from one image to another smoother, I applied a linear gradient on the masks.
And I think that's pretty much it... Maybe someday I could try to make a similar montage in Sodankylä, where landscapes are very different, yet equally beautiful. Until next time, then.