D750 - Country Barns Winter Scenes & Northern Lights

Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Tamron 24-70 f2.8mm, SB-700 Speedlight, Tripod, Lightroom & Photoshop CC

An old barn covered in snow back in January on the way to work followed by an old barn and corn crib at Templeton farm underneath the northern lights in late April. For these images, I used my Nikon camera and Tamron lense an aperture priority for the snow scene photographs while switched to manual for the northern lights.

I was lucky to get the northern light photographs has I was sitting at home watching the news on channel 13 and they kept showing photographers sending in their shots of northern lights here in central Iowa which usually we can’t see them. I figured I know a dark location so headed out to the Templeton farm and was shocked to see them with my eye and saw them even dancing. It was really cool! I photographed them until they started to go away.

I edited both of these in Lightroom at first letting the Auto setting in the basic sliders to the first adjustments and than I fine tuned them to get the look I was looking for. With the snow scene, I increased the exposure and white slider to brighten up the snow.  For the northern light images, I adjusted the shadows and brightness on the barn and corn crib after the first Auto settings were applied. Noise levels were also adjusted on them by letting Lightroom select the sky automatically.  After using Lightroom, I didn’t have to do much in PhotoShop other than using the healing and cloning brush to get rid of unwanted objects like dust on my camera sensor that transfers to the photographs.

Mike Kleinwolterink