Ok I’ll kick off with some thoughts on venues, obviously we may need to tweak plans nearer the time depending on weather. I’ve restricted to White Peak destinations to suit Steve F.

Lathkill dale. Chrome Hill. Winnats Pass. Cheedale (includes Millers dale, Monsal head etc). Dovedale is lovely but can get rammed with tourists. Chatsworth of course, if you like your landscapes arranged rather than wild.

Villages and towns we have the likes of Bakewell and Eyam, Ashford in the Water is very pretty.

Any other ideas? I don’t mind where we go..

Paul

Either day fine at the moment. Dawn is around 08:00 and sunset around 16:30 at that time of the year. There are lots of potential venues, are folk thinking about being out for the whole day? (OK by me) in which case photograph dawn / spot of breakfast / morning photography / spot of lunch / afternoon & sunset photography sounds like a vague plan. And lets us cover more than 1 venue.
Signing off, out of web contact until sometime tomorrow.

Paul

Oh yes, one more bit of advice from a mate who's photographed the Northern Lights before. Our camera sensors are a lot better at imaging the lights than the naked eye. So the images from the camera should look better than we can see at the time. If only all photographic subjects worked like that

Paul

OK as regards manual focus the traditional advice is that autofocus won't work 'cos its too dim (K30 is supposed to be good in low light but even then...). I'd be very wary about just whacking the lens on infinity - easy to knock it in the dark and then all your shots are out, you may only realise when it's too late! Some people recommend getting it spot on and then taping the focus ring in place. Also, on my sigma 15mm it focusses PAST infinity (weird eh?) and at f2.8 I do need to get the focus right otherwise all the stars end up as tint blurs when I pixel peep. I have heard that some lenses can shift as the temp falls. So if you get the focus right at room temp, by the time you've been at -15 degrees for 3 hours the lens components have shrunk and your focus is out...so not really sure what the right thing to do is here...

Paul

Thanks for posting this, I have the same issue - lens profiles exist in LR4 but I have to select em manually. I'll have a read of MattMatics link and then my brain will hurt too...

Paul

I'm off to Sweden for Northern Lights shots in Feb and have been reading intensively. Most useful site I found was this -
http://www.alaskaphotographyblog.com/how-to-photograph-the-northern-lights-with-...
My tips -
If you use a UV filter, take it off.
Take lots of spare batteries, nightime cold will kill them - does your K30 take AAs? If so lithium AA cells have very good cold resistance.
You want the widest and fastest lens you can get.
K30 has low noise which is a good thing.
You'll need to focus manually which needs some practice at night.
Bjolester on here lives in Norway and photographs the aurora, check his settings out -
https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/topic/northern-lights-above-trondheim-38257
Very best of luck and really keen to see how you get on, please post results and any tips when you get back!

Paul

Hi Peter.
That's odd - lots of discussions and comparisons on the web, most say that GigE should be faster or at least the same as USB2. Can't find anyone who says it should be significantly slower, and mine certainly isn't. YMMV (and indeed clearly does).
Paul

I have a Netgear NV+ with 4 1.5TB drives, backed up to hard drives. Two points.
1. I edit images on the NAS in LR4 on a Win7/64 machine with 6GB of memory linked to the NAS via gig ethernet and I don't find it painfully slow at all, but I will move some test images to local HD just to assess differences.
2. If your NAS functions as a DLNA server and you get a smart TV that can act as a DLNA client, you can look at JPG versions of images (and any movies on the NAS, and listen to Itunes music) via your TV. Which I thought was quite cool...

Paul

Yep, I also found the develop module a sod to get used to, but now would not go back....

Paul

Excellent, many thanks for the info. I think the star trails critical shutter speed may actually vary depending on whether you're pointing your camera towards the equator or a pole, but I'm not good enough at maths to work out how..
This info is really useful because I'm off to North of Sweden in Feb to try to photograph some aurora myself. 2013 is apparently a solar maximum so fingers crossed. With my luck I've probably booked the 1 quiet week out of the whole year

Paul