Haida Picture Appreciation | May 2024

This month’s photography theme is "Night Sky, Stars, and Aurora Borealis", let's appreciate some amazing photos taken by our excellent official Haida Ambassadors with Haida filters!

After yesterday’s natural spectacle, one needs time to recover, after the whole world experienced the extreme Northern Lights. I have never seen Northern Lights in the Bavarian Alps in such an intense light spectrum before. For this, I rushed through the night without sleep and took more than one and a half thousand pictures in my homeland under special conditions. It requires experience, a lot of time, a good portion of good mood, and good equipment. Under such conditions, I’m very happy to attach my Haida NanoPro MC Clear Night Filter to my Haida M15 Filter Holder to reduce the artificial lighting from surrounding villages and thus counteract light pollution. This creates a perfect basis for further image editing.

Canon EOS 5DSR

Irix 21mm f/1.4 Dragonfly

F2.5 | 4-6 sec | ISO 3000-5000

Haida M15 Filter Halter

Haida NanoPro MC Clear Night Filter

On Friday 10th May we had a spectacular display of the aurora borealis right across the UK. It was even visible to the naked eye in the south east of the country where I live. It was quite sensational.

Of course I wanted to photograph it, so travelled to a local reservoir that is some distance from city lights and which usually has a good dark sky. It’s still in a well-populated area so some light pollution on the horizon is inevitable. I wanted to shoot the aurora colours as accurately as I could though, so loaded the Haida Clear Night filter into the back of the Sigma 14mm f/1.4 DG DN Art lens to clear away all that unnatural orange glow. I chose this lens as I’ve had great success with it before, and because the wide maximum aperture allows relatively short shutter speeds. It not only has special holder for rear-mounted filters, such as the Haida Clear Night and the ND series, but it also has a designated place for the Haida Anti-Fog belt that prevents the front element misting up on cold nights.

That Friday the new moon was very low in the sky, so the stars and the aurora didn’t have much to compete with. The aurora was bright too, allowing me to shoot 2-second exposures at just ISO 640 and f/1.4 with the filter in place – the filter hardly extended the exposure at all.

There’s a very cool feature in the Lumix S5 series cameras called Live View Composite that allows a series of exposures to be made and overlaid on top of each other. After the initial exposure only new areas of brightness are recorded – as though the layer blend mode is set to Lighten for each new exposure. This means you can shoot a single frame with the foreground and stars correctly exposed, and then subsequent images only record bright things that have moved – the stars. This allows us to shoot ‘long exposure’ star trails without the foreground burning out. The shot here was made with 900 2-second exposures over the course of half an hour. The camera just stacks them into a RAW/JPEG file automatically so there’s nothing extra to do in post-production.

Panasonic Lumix S5llX

Sigma 50mm f/1.4

F/1.4 | 2 sec | ISO 640

Haida Clear Night filter 

They are very rare, when I can see and photograph the moon. Because where I live it's usually raining or cloudy. My two-year-old son loves to see the moon and when he sees it, he starts screaming dad looks at the moon, so I take the opportunity to take a photo every time it's clear.

SONY Alpha 7R V

70-200 las gII

185 mm | F/5.6 | 1/200 sec | ISO 320

Haida M10-II with CPL filter 

Dun Briste, Downpatrick Head, Ireland

This image captures the celestial display of the aurora borealis painting the night sky above the iconic Sea Stack Dun Briste, which is located in the northern part of Ireland’s Co Mayo.

Sony A7RIII

Irix 15mm f/2.4

F/2.5 | 30 sec | ISO 640

Haida Clear Night Filter

A great clear night for star trails in Upstate New York! I decided to use the Haida Clear-Night Rear Filter on my Sigma 14-24mm F/2.8 DG DN which was very easy to install. The results were sharp with great color. As you can see in this startrails image, the airglow is showing some great color that resembles the northern lights.

Sony Alpha a9 II

Sigma photo 14-24 DG DN f/1.4 Art

F/2.8 | 30 sec

Haida Clear-Night Filter