Have you ever imagined you’d finally see, let alone find yourself photographing the Auroral Borealis???
The Aurora is always moving and can be tough to capture, but, with the tips in this article, hopefully it will be a little easier the next time you have the opportunity!
I've been very fortunate to witness and photograph the aurora several times at great intensity on my travels abroad and now here, just down the road. Here are some of the things I learned that helped me capture the recent Aurora here in my own back yard and will hopefully help prepare you for the Solar maximum next year. We should see quite a few freak storms as low as Texas!!
Shooting a moving target, in the dark. It can seem daunting but really it isnt. Capturing the aurora is an amazing experience. Like catching lightning in a bottle really. Sometimes dancing to a swift tempo, sometimes barely moving. There isnt a magic combination of settings to work for every nuance of the northern lights. You must match its speed, meet its stride at whatever cost. One moment that might be 1 second exposures at 10,000 ISO to capture the sharpest of corona. Another may require a much slower shutter speed like 4 or 5 seconds and a lower ISO like 800 or 1000. Sometimes the light is slow but also bright. What do you do? How do you know that your exposing properly and the answer is, unless your reviewing your LCD post capture your likely under or over exposing the image.
Planning for photographing the aurora borealis requires a bit of help from science and understanding that some places are better than others for a chance at seeing them. The further north you travel, the better your chances! Once you’re there, there are quite a few applications for smartphones these days that will alert you if there is a chance of a solar flare up nearby, based on the SWPC ovation auroral forecast. Which makes the science bit a lot easier.I use the “My Aurora Forecast” App for iOS for this and not only does it help you understand if you will see them, but also the cloud coverage, and the best places to view them from!
All this to say that the best advice I can give for capturing the northern lights is to Plan ahead, be aware, be engaged and willing to make adjustments on the fly, know your camera well and dont fear ISO. Oh and use a tripod! I use the Really Right Stuff TVC-24L and Ascend -14, check them out! I also use the Sky Watcher Star Adventurer for tracking!
SO many folks that I talk to regarding exposure in general still seem to fear noise and therefor any ISO over 200. I just simply do not understand this logic. Why? Even at risk of missing a shot or sacrificing crucial details to keep the ISO as low as possible. With the tools we have at our disposal these days like Lightrooms AI denoise, or Topaz' legendary denoise, a bit of technique and good old fashioned know how, theres simply no reason to fear it. First you have to ask yourself what your output is. Whos going to see the image, and how. Is there anything moving in my exposure? These answers will dictate how you capture your images. For me the goal is always to have the cleanest, most flawless imagery whether thats on print or on screen at any magnification or at any size. So, I make choices based on that. Capturing the landscape at what I consider the best light, with the best array of settings for the cleanest image possible. For Astro imagery this often means capturing the scene at blue hour just minutes before darkness sets in. Oftentimes facing perpendicular to a fading or rising lightsource so that the scene has depth and contrast with some directional light. This adds tension, and clarity. Then capturing the sky with a star tracker or stacking many images for noise reduction to then blend with the blue hour image. There simply is no way to achieve the level of detail and clarity that I want, any other way with a single exposure. Adding in artificial light is not an option, its just not for me. The resulting images are nearly free of any noise and can be printed HUGE. Many will argue that its "cheating", yet the skill required, the patience and the ability to combine the images is far more challenging and rewarding.
We know that there are a trio of settings that control exposure. Aperture, Shutterspeed and ISO. Aperture controls the opening in the lens, and thus the light hitting the sensor. But also the depth of field. Shutterspeed controls how fast we can snap that image, and ISO controls how sensitive that sensor is to the light hitting it. At night its fair to say that we likely want a large aperture. For me thats almost always ƒ/2.8 unless I am using a star tracker. Thats one setting set, and not to be changed. All too often I see folks adjusting aperture on the fly without considering this also controls the depth of field and therefor what is and more importantly ISNT in focus in the scene. Once youve chosen a focal length and focused your lens on a distant star or light, leave it. Dont touch it, and if you change aperture you ALWAYS want to recheck focus.
The next setting is shutterspeed. This is where we ask ourselves "are things moving?". The northern lights certainly are, and if youre the type to capture the sky and land in a single image its hyper critical to watch the wind, as any brush or trees above the horizon will likely blur at a shutterspeed less than say 1/30th of a second. There are almost always short gaps in the wind, it pays to be patient for those. For aurora I have been all over the spectrum of shutterspeeds. Ranging from 1/5th of a second at a mere 800 ISO when it was directly overhead and a Kp8 a very intense storm in Iceland. In the same storm minutes later I was at 5 seconds with an ISO of 5,000. Sure you could pick a speed and stay there and youd capture some nice images but they are moving and changing constantly. Morphing as if alive. When they are most active is when youll want faster shutterspeeds and slower when they too are slower.
Looking straight up into a Kp8 storm
Brightness and ISO will vary a lot and its important to watch not only your exposure constantly but also the color channels whenever possible as they can also blow out and cause you saturation and color degredation issues down the line. The only way to know that on the fly unless youre an ace genius film shooter and know the exposure calculations by heart is to watch your histogram. When I ask folks "what is your exposure" and they tell me, I always asky why those settings? When tell me "oh, it looks too dark, or too bright. I have to pause. Thats simply not a good enough answer and we should all know how to read and use the histogram! Knowledge is power! Pretty much every camera made in the last few years allows you to see a "live-view" or "preview" histogram which shows you what the cameras seeing based on the jpeg on your LCD. It is NOT the raw histogram but a MUCH more accurate way of deciding whether or not youve gotten a good exposure, the caviat is that its basically useless after blue hour as your camera simply cannot meter the dark scene in front of you. You can also playback the image and pretty much every camera made in the last decade allows you to see a histogram there, if not all of the channels individually. This is the only true way to know in field whether or not you have clipped your shadows or blown your highlights. If you havent then you can rest assured knowing all of the possible detail is captured and waiting to be extracted. If you dont or arent acquainted or familiar with your histogram, do yourself a favor and learn it. I promise it will help you trmendously and likely stop you from bracketing unneccesarily or shooting and "praying" you got a good exposure. There should be no guessing in the field. Be patient, be ready and again, know your camera. This could and likely will mean the difference between getting a shot or not!
If youv've captured images youre struggling to put together, I can help! Shoot me an email at Joshua@WildLightExposures.com or book a Virtual Mentoring Session below!