Ashaig Cemetery
Ashaig Cemetery with a smidge of aurora.
On a cold night in February, my aurora app started pinging with an orange alert. Orange is worth going out for. Red is even better. Out I went with Mrs T in tow as lead photographer’s assistant.
I had visited Ashaig cemetery before, when the sky was clear but with no aurora. I had a cracking Milky Way shot (see below) but I thought I could do better, so it was my primary target for the next aurora.
The cemetery itself is in a beautiful location. It overlooks the sandy Ashaig Beach (really only visible at low tide so check your tide timetables). It also happens to be an excellent bird watching spot with a mix of river, meadow and wader landscapes if that’s your thing.
In addition to being the resting place of many Skye families, the cemetery is a Commonwealth War Grave containing the remains of a group of seafarers whose ship, the HMS Curacoa, was accidentally sliced in half by the Queen Mary in late 1942. 337 men on board the Curacoa we killed, with no casualties on the Queen Mary which had to sail on due to orders not to stop.
On this night, it was bitterly cold, and turned quite cloudy by the time I got to Ashaig. The aurora was making itself visible between the scudding clouds, with a cutting wind added into the mix. The eerie green glow adds to the atmosphere created by the gnarled dead rowan tree that watches over the graves. Spooky it was!
Taking great care to avoid stepping on any of the graves, I wanted to put some light onto the scene to highlight the amazing twisted branches of that tree. This meant keeping the camera on a tripod, setting the shutter to 15 seconds with a 2 second delay, having Mrs T shine a torch across the scene from the left side. Getting the right amount of torchlight was very hit-and-miss. Too much and you end up with hot spots which are way too bright. Too little and you can’t see any detail. She developed a zig-zag motion to get the beam to light the gravestones and the tree without making it appear too unnatural, and keeping it nicely balanced with the overall exposure I was aiming for.
As with all this night time photography, it’s incredibly difficult to compose and focus when there’s not enough night to the naked eye. For this shot, it was important to get the focus in the right spot to keep the close gravestone on the right as sharp as the tree in the middle distance, with sharp stars in the sky, all at f/2.8. I ended up manually focusing on the gravestone in the middle to give enough depth of field behind and in front to get what I needed.
Mrs T was getting a bit freaked out by the ghosts and weird noises after a while so, rather than waiting for hours in case the clouds moved off, we headed back to the warmth of our cottage. As it happens, I think the cloud with the gaps showing the aurora on the left and the stars at the top makes the image a lot more atmospheric.
And here’s the shot from an earlier trip with an epic Milky Way combined with a really colourful sky glow to go with it.
