How to take photos of the Southern Lights

Most digital cameras can take some sort of photograph of the Aurora, phones and GoPro’s as well. The settings here are my preferred set up to take photos of the Southern Lights. This is how I taught my guests to take photographs using their own camera’s while guiding Aurora Tours in Norway.  If you are headed away on holiday, take your camera out to a dark place and practice photographing the stars in preparation.  Make sure to have a look at the images on the computer to see how you did. Don’t just rely on the camera display as it won’t reveal poor focus or light balance.

Low Light Photography

You are going to be photographing in really low light. You need to configure your camera to allow for this.  There are 3 settings camera’s use increase the brightness.  Aperture – the size of the hole letting light in the camera.  Shutter speed, how long we leave the shutter open to absorb light and finally, ISO the sensitivity of sensor.  If you leave your camera on auto (or use a mobile phone), it will bump up the ISO (or sensitivity) setting. This gives a really grainy image.  To avoid this, you need to switch your camera to ‘Manual’ mode.  Especially on compact cameras this may be hidden in the menus.  If your camera doesn’t have a manual mode, keep reading as you may still be able to adjust some of the other settings.  Or you might find that a fireworks or night sky preset mode works adequately.  Once you are in manual mode you will be able to adjust the following:

Aperture

Set the Aperture as wide as possible (the smallest f. number). This allows the most light in to your camera. The trade off when we do this we need to be very careful to get the focus correct.  For context, this setting is the one you would use for those blurry background photos. Some photographers would suggest you to take it back one setting from the widest to help with the focus. The great thing with shooting the sky, it doesn’t change distance from the camera so once you have the focus correct we don’t need to touch it (as long as we don’t accidentally bump it).  With the wider aperture the scene will appear brighter for us to get the focus right too.

ISO

Increase the ISO, however no higher than 1600 or maybe 2000 if possible.  This is the sensitivity of the camera, any higher the pictures will be too ´noisy´.  This is an easy way to make your photos brighter and bring out the Aurora in your pictures.  Some camera’s you may need to go higher.  In daylight conditions, a photographer wouldn’t usually have their ISO above 100. When shooting images to sell, so we do want to keep this low if possible.

Shutter speed

Start as short as possible to get your photos bright enough… this really will depend on your aperture.  As a starting point, if you are shooting f. 1.4 start around 2 seconds, f. 4.0, maybe 30 seconds.  Leaving the shutter open for longer, again allows more light in your pictures.  This is the setting I adjust the most on a night to alter the exposure of my photos.  Especially when the activity really picks up.  When we shoot a photo ordinarily we are in 100th’s of a second or faster. Once we get slower than about 1/60th of a second our hands are too shaky images will be blurred. We need a tripod or at least a sturdy fence post or rock.  In Aurora photography our shutter speed is many times slower than this. It is paramount to have the camera perfectly still.  This means using a tripod, and even still you may find the stars have tails in your photo.  This is likely from when you press the shutter, to avoid this, you can use a remote (see if your camera has an app for your phone) or a self timer.  Set the timer for 2-3 seconds. This will help preventing the camera from moving throughout the photo and your images will come out sharper.

Manual Focus

Unfortunately in the dark your camera won´t be able to auto focus. The camera cannot pick up on an object in the sky to shoot.  With the wide aperture, the focus needs to be really accurate as the focal length is at its shortest. Take your camera off autofocus and select manual focus (sometimes this is on the lens sometimes in the settings).  Look for an object on your camera display that is bright enough to see that is 10 or more metres away. If your camera display has a digital zoom, you should also use this to get sharper focus. Try to avoid zooming in with your lens as this will reduce your aperture. Use this bright object and adjust the focus until the object is sharpest.    Car number plates are great to focus on, the moon can be good, or a friend with a torch. Don´t just set the focus on your camera´s infinity option – this will most often not be correct.  I have seen some people set focus on a bright object using the auto focus and then point the camera to the stars, but this will get tiring quickly and is not for every camera.

The settings you need will depend on your camera, the brightness/movement of the Lights, other light (eg moonlight) and the photograph you are trying to take.  As you wait for the lights to come out, take some time to adjust your settings. Make the aperture wide (smallest f stop number), increase the ISO (start at 1600) and decrease your shutter speed.  Take a test photo and adjust your shutter speed until you have a photo that gives the sky a dark blue, or even light blue appearance.  The camera is now absorbing far more light than our eyes.  So aim it towards the pole and take a photo, any aurora will show up in your camera far before our eyes.  Once you have the aurora in sight, you can reduce the shutter speed to make your photo’s darker and faster.

This type of photography is really hard on your camera – you might notice it takes a long time for a photo to process.  And chances are its cold wherever you are photographing.  Both of these factors use a lot of battery power. Make sure you are fully charged each night and consider taking a spare battery with you.  If you do run flat, take the battery out and put it close to your skin to warm up.  You may find this gets you a couple more photos.

With long shutter speeds, its really important to have your camera perfectly still. Tripods are a necessity (or at least a sturdy fence post). Think also about how you can reduce the movement of the camera when you click the shutter button. The easiest is to use a built in timer in your camera, alternatively you can buy remotes or connect to some cameras from your phone via blue tooth.

Photo´s with people….

If you´re feeling ambitious and wanting capture the moment, it is possible to take great pictures with people and the aurora.

Silhouette

If there is very little light around, or the moon is behind your subjects, a silhouette shot can be great.  You will want to keep the settings similar to when you you would photograph just the lights. While you are taking the picture, the people in the picture will need to be as still as possible. Therefore you may want to reduce the shutter speed.  This will make the picture darker and the lights won’t be visible, so you would need to increase the ISO to compensate.  When shooting a silhouette you may choose to keep the focus set on the sky rather than the people as they are an outline only.  With this style, you can also set the camera timer to be a bit longer and get yourself in the photo! Just remember to be absolutely still once the photo starts until the shutter closes.

Portrait

We can also take portrait photo’s where people are fully visible with the Lights.  To do this, I have people stand about 3 metres from the camera and frame the image so I get their fingertips in the photo.  Next adjust the focus, you need to set the focus on the subject’s eyes -especially if you are shooting wider than f2 aperture.  Once you set the focus, its important your subject doesn’t come any closer to or further away from the camera and if there are multiple people in the photo, they need to be the same distance from the lens.  Next, while the photo is being taken, give a very quick flash with a cellphone or torch light – if the person is within 3-4m of the light, you can´t make this flash short enough! Don’t turn the light on and off that is too slow.  Turn the light on and hide it against your body.  Practice makes perfect on this and I promise you will have many overly bright faces before you perfect it.

You may want to increase the countdown timer to make things easier on yourself, or make your shutter speed slower to give more time (if you do this be sure to decrease the ISO to compensate for the increased brightness).  On a really dark night, it is actually possible to walk through a photo like this and not be seen and those in the photo can walk away while the photo is still taking, although they still need to be absolutely still while you do the flash!

This same technique is what I use to photograph people with glow worms. Or you can skip the flash, and subjects can do ‘light painting’ with a small light on a long exposure photo.

Video

Finally Video. Most of the moving images we see of the Aurora are time lapses. However in real life the lights do move, and fast.  With the right camera you may be able to shoot a real time video, this is trickier and it will be low quality but its still fun to try. Set your focus and aperture as per above.  This time we need to increase our shutter speed.  The human eye see’s at about 30 frames a second so to get a ‘seamless’ video our shutter speed must be 1/30th of a second or faster. For us we still need all the light we can get so 1/30 is as fast as we want to go. To make the video visible we need to make the picture brighter so now adjust the ISO to a point where you can see the aurora in the video. On an amateur camera the video will always be grainy because of this high ISO.  But its fun to try this, when the lights are dancing above you, even just to capture the squeals of excitement.

Possibly the most important thing to remember

At the end of the night, don’t forget to change your camera back to auto mode and set the focus back to your preferred auto focus settings!!!