Starry, starry night

This is just marvellous. In some ways northern lights photography is comparatively straight forward: accept the possibility you might not see them, book tickets anyway, then point your camera at the sky if you see them. This picture demonstrates the complexity of the job, though – make no mistake about it, a shot like this won’t work if your camera is in full auto mode. This is so nicely composed and captured and makes me truly wistful for the return of the lights this season. Roll on winter 2021.

God, judging this competition was impossible. Impossible. But by the time I realised how good the final crop of images was going to be, the commitment had been made and it seemed churlish to back out. Much umming and ahhing later, and this blinder of an image is the top of the pile, but frankly the order of my top 10 images has changed so much the top spot could have deservingly gone to any of about 20 other possibilities. But here are the things I like about it: the balance of foreground and background is spot on, and the focussing job isn’t too shabby either. The processing has been done with an artist’s touch, and even the light pollution on the horizon has been deftly incorporated into the image. Spot on.

What a cracker. The effort needed to capture this spellbinding image must have been immense – in the planning, execution and post-production. The lonely figure in the middle of the frame is perfectly placed, and the exposure and colour balancing of the final image is just genius.

Milky Way images are ten-a-penny on the internet these days, which I think inures people to the effort and technical mastery needed to shoot them. This delicately shot, carefully processed image is an absolute beauty that I couldn’t stop looking at.

What a magnificent experience this aurora must have been. Nothing beats the sound of a snowy wilderness at night – the snow muffles noise, making the northern lights a sensory experience that’s about much more than just the visual. Every aurora is a learning experience as well – here, I would have double-checked my focus on the trees in the foreground, getting them as sharp as possible to give my audience’s eyes something to hook onto immediately.

I often fall in love with images for their technical imperfections – imperfections make art what it is, and the shadowy, blurry horses, and the soft corners of this absolutely spellbinding shot, make for an ethereal, captivating image that I could – and have – look at for hours.

Shoot this photograph straight into my veins. Or at least get it printed on some nice paper, pop it in a good frame hang it somewhere prominent, because I love it.There are strong Stranger Things vibes here, thanks to that haunting red glow behind the trees, but the rest of the image hangs together just so well. I love the spooky water – with its faint reflection – on the left of the image, the perfectly focussed stars above, the way the colours complement each other. The perfect nightime image.

Good Milky Way photography requires top-notch planning – but you still need to go out and shoot the damn thing, so it’s satisfying to see such a well planned and executed image. This hangs together really nicely, and I like the ghostly illumination of Doldabarn Castle, which picks out a few details that would otherwise be lost to the shadows. I’m a touch less convinced by the torch beam blasting into the night sky – if you could see the person producing the light it might give a little context, but this is still a beautifully-made frame.

This, I love. I don’t even know how it was done – is that a zoom blur? Anyway, in a world of relatively samey astronomical pictures (there’s only one Milky Way, after all), this is an unusual and creative interpretation of the night sky that’s eye catching, beautiful and fantastically composed.

It’s so tempting to think that the only good star trail shots are those where the stars make a full 360-degree revolution, so it’s marvellous to see an image that tears up the rulebook and still produces one of my favourite results in this competition. The barn has the chef’s kiss amount of light on it – it’s spooky without being murky, it’s foreboding without losing loads of its detail in the shadows. The star trails behind are nicely done and look like they’re falling – this looks like a piece of concept art from Interstellar – and I love everything about it.

There were a couple of Sycamore Gap pictures in this contest, but none I liked as much as this. The faint halo around the tree, caused by light pollution, works wonderfully and the stars behind are nicely captured. Get it printed!

This is such a great idea for an image, and so much has been done right. I like the illuminated tent, I like the trees on the horizon in the background, and the idea of adding a figure or two to a starry skies image is tried and tested for a reason, which is that it adds context and interest to images that often lack the human touch. It’s a good lesson, too – your average head torch produces way too much light for you to be able to work it into a shot that includes the Milky Way, so here I’d have been tempted to run the light either with a filter in front of it to take some of the brightness out of it, or to shoot two exposures and blend them together to avoid the light source being such a distraction.