Hi and welcome to my website! I thought I’d put this post up after discovering this photo will be featured in the 2019 Discover Wisconsin Calendar. I’ve been submitting photos to the Discover Wisconsin photo contest for the past couple years. Each year, they reached out to me, but it wasn’t until this year that a photo was picked for the final calendar. I’m super excited to have one of my photos featured in the calendar and to be associated with Discover Wisconsin as I think they’re one of the better places to have your photos featured in Wisconsin.

A cool thing about this shot is it’s the first time I’ve ever seen the northern lights and photographed them which at the time was very exciting!

Location

This photo was taken at the Bayshore County Park in Brown County, WI which is about 15 minutes away from Green Bay, WI on the bay of Green Bay. On this night I had originally headed up to Door County to take pictures of the milky way in either Sturgeon Bay or Cana Island. Before I left I had heard that the northern lights might be out, but I wasn’t planning on shooting them as I had never seen them before and it’s never a guarantee they’ll be out. I typically like to go somewhere and take pictures if it’s a pretty strong chance I’ll get the shot I want, otherwise I’ll stay home.

On my way up, once I passed Green Bay, I checked an app that tries to predict auroras and it said there was a good chance I’d be seeing them at that time. Shortly after that I saw these strange clouds moving faster than normal, almost like spot lights you’d see from a casino pointed in the air. I decided to make a quick detour at Bayshore County Park.

On my way down to the water level I noticed a county cop parked in the parking lot. I was the only other person in the parking lot besides the cop so I was preparing for him to talk to me seeing as it was past midnight at this point. As I was setting up my tripod he stopped over in his car and asked what I was doing there as the park was now closed. I said that I think the northern lights are out and pointed at the horizon. He seemed a little surprised as to the naked eye at night they really don’t look that impressive. He told me to take a couple shots of it and move on which is what I did. The photo you see here is one of about half a dozen that I snapped quick before leaving. After that I headed up to a park in Door County and took photos until 3 or 4 am.

Composition

Admittedly, I was in a hurry when taking this shot as I didn’t have a lot of time with the cop instructing me to take a couple photos and move on. I fired off a half a dozen 30 second exposures. I found some nice rocks near the parking lot to use a foreground element and then leveled my tripod.

For a couple shots I used my LED lights to illuminate the foreground and for a couple others I didn’t. In one shot the aurora was stronger and the foreground wasn’t lit. In another one the opposite was true. With this, I combined both photos later in Photoshop for the best of both worlds. Each were about 2 minutes apart and my tripod hadn’t moved between the shots which made it easier to combine them. Below are the two photos I used for this one –

Check out a few other shots I got this night as well – https://www.flickr.com/photos/neal_grosskopf/albums/72157680117433943

Post Processing

Unlike a lot of my photos this was didn’t require a lot of post processing. Like I mentioned earlier, I had one shot with a stronger aurora and another with a better lit foreground so I combined both of them to create a stronger image. Beyond that, I changed some basic sliders in Adobe Lightroom like white balance, exposure, contrast and saturation. I also tried to make the branches light bright on the smaller tree on the left hand side as I found them distracting.

Overall, I’m very excited to have this be featured in the Discover Wisconsin 2019 calendar! If you’d like to see more of my work check me out on the following sites:

• https://www.flickr.com/photos/neal_grosskopf/
• https://500px.com/neal_g
• https://www.facebook.com/RealArtistsShipPhotography/
• https://www.instagram.com/neal.grosskopf/
• http://www.capturewisconsin.com/users/nealgrosskopf

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Exposure Stacking

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