Photograph Northern Lights with ANY Camera

No joke, this is an aurora time-lapse shot on a GoPro an older GoPro and you can make these too. Thanks for tuning in I'm Michael and I'm going to prove to you that you can take pictures of northern lights with basically any modern camera All you need to know are some basic techniques and to work with a device that gives you at least some amount of manual control I'll show you how you might need to adapt to various kinds of aurora displays and to go a step further I've made this the first stop in a series on making aurora time-lapses to get started We need to understand a couple quirks about our target first northern lights behave a little bit differently depending on overall strength time of night And whether you are shooting aurora from arctic locations or middle latitudes when auroras dive further south from the lower 48 of the United States southern Australia and New Zealand or most of Europe You'll need to know when and how to plan for when they might be visible and luckily I've got a whole other playlist Detailing how to do that So check that out after finishing up this video series Aurora visible from locations more distant from the poles are typically going to be on your northern horizon Often just appearing as a bit of a haze in the Arctic very weak aurora displays also appear like this but much closer to you I'm going to call these both a stage one aurora from a photography perspective Initially, I had thought I'd made this scale up as sort of a good way to convey the major differences in brightness We need to be conscious of as we see the aurora go through various changes through a night or very night tonight But it turns out I'm not actually the first one to describe them this way stage one is quite dim and requires long exposure times High ISO settings and can be difficult or even impossible to see to the untrained naked Eye avoid attempting to take photos of this kind of aurora on anything other than a DSLR camera for visual aurora I recommend watching this video from yen You know who is seeing them for the first time in the Arctic and does a great job of describing the differences between various aurora Displays way up north using a very similar staging system He invented on the fly and I agree with link is in the description Stage two is when you start having a brighter and more dynamic show These are naked eye lights visible in mid latitudes on the horizon on up to about 45 degrees Occupying half of the northern sky or a less dynamic overhead auroral oval from Arctic locations This is when vertical pillars are visible further south or just when general aurora glow or pulses are occurring in the Arctic This is the point where aurora are unmistakable But may not yet impress everyone and finally stage three These are the brightest form of aurora and trust me. You'll know it when you see it this is when the lights are bright enough you can comfortably walk around in the dark without a flashlight or Even read a book in the Arctic. This is when fast-moving highly dynamic and even Jaw-dropping green white and purple aurora displays occur and sometimes Coronas that are visible overhead further south a stage three will also mean overhead or nearly overhead aurora But the speeds and changes are slower but replaced instead with noticeably bright blood reds Oranges and the green is more than enough light to light up the landscape around you. Oh, right cameras, so with our first and probably most ideal camera of choice nice middle-of-the-road full-frame or crop sensor DSLR camera with an External remote shutter or built-in intervalometer function and always use a tripod for lenses There's a lot of right answers But many more wrong ones in my experience the ideal aurora lens is an f4 or shorter Aperture and an 11 millimeter focal length or a crop sensor camera or about 14 millimeter for a full-frame camera But really anything from a fisheye lens on up to a nifty 50 use the right way We'll take great photos and time lapses but air on the side of wider wide scenes of northern lights are preferred and you'll spend far less time moving the camera around as Your scene changes and for time lapses specifically you want to move the camera as little as possible Maybe not even three times in an entire night if you can get away with it F 3.5 kit lenses and f4 specialty lenses are often just fine Faster lenses are great But you could just compensate with higher ISO or longer exposure times on slower lenses if the 18 to 55 millimeter 3.5 kit lens you own seems like the best one or the only option for aurora that you own then no problem My current lens of preference is a 20 millimeter f 1.4 on a full-frame camera Affording me very short exposures and wide-ish views on bright aurora displays But I can also get really sharp and detailed images with a Tamron 24 to 70 f2 8 at wide open a problem I've had forever shooting Aurora is that there's always something amazing happening in a part of the sky Opposite where I'm shooting a time-lapse so multiple cameras help if you're a little nuts about these things What or team up with other photography friends and share your compositions with one another every experience is better with friends and even better to relive later DSLRs and lenses absolutely need to be focused properly and that's tough to do at night if you aren't already familiar with Astrophotography first autofocus is never going to work reliably switch your lens or camera body to manual focus second point your camera at a bright star or a planet or even a distant streetlight turn on live view and adjust focus until your Point of light as a small as possible use a 5 or 10 times focus zoom to make fine adjustments again Making your bright star as small as possible even better find a dimmer star and adjust again for settings Let's start with weak Aurora stage one for Aurora I always switch my camera to manual mode and that'll be the case for all stages High ISO settings are generally noisy on most DSLR cameras, especially older ones Typically 3200 is all the higher you should need to take it stage one lights aren't terribly dynamic and don't move a whole lot So we are going to rely on long exposure times instead 10 to 20 second long exposures should do the trick This is why it is very important that you use a tripod regardless of what camera you are working with Not a Walmart special either something stable is going to be needed You don't want the slightest breeze or wobble ruining your precious shots so about ISO 1600 f2 wait or 3200 and f4 and 10 to 20 second long exposures for weak Aurora displays slower F3 5 and f4 lenses might be best at 20 seconds Well f2 and faster might be better at 6 to 10 the first time you photograph Aurora Feel free to experiment with your gear shoot in raw mode so that you have a chance of getting a lot of forgiveness in Post-processing in case you didn't quite nail it the first time and sometimes that's the difference between a shot You are proud of and when you send to the recycle bin always shoot Aurora and raw mode whenever possible For stage 2 or bright displays It's time to shorten exposure times by about half the settings I just discussed previously will blow out on these brighter displays and there's a ton of dynamic range between stage 1 and stage 2 a subtle glow on the horizon versus bright displays can be 4 or 5 stops difference in brightness with this display in Manitoba for example I was shooting as low as 2.5 Seconds at ISO 1600 and got dangerously close to blowing out some photos with 6 second exposures for stage 2 continue using ISO 1600 with 2 and a half to 6 second exposure times as for stage 3 or very dynamic and extremely bright Overhead and nearly overhead displays. It's actually possible to do real-time video on some prosumer grade video and SLR cameras But for photos, it's going to require some fast decisions and quick work You might be as low as ISO 800 and 1 second exposures on f2 lenses in this case or just 4 seconds ISO 1600 on f4 lenses and now this is where the results will vary the most by what gear you are using Changes in brightness are happening rapidly and you may have to adjust on the fly You'll need to adapt to be able to get good shots of these sorts of displays Without blowing them out and definitely air on the side of short exposures and maybe even using your cameras burst mode What I mean things change fast a 1 second exposure might blur details right out some higher-end cameras Especially ones produced recently have been able to produce real-time video of Aurora at price points that don't require mortgaging your house but they are definitely not cheap either at ISO 20,000 to 80,000 f 1.4 and 124th of a second you'll get to record video of these displays I for example now have hours of footage on my a7 s3 using these settings some DSLR cameras Have a built-in time-lapse video function Sony specifically calls this SNQ This is a great shortcut to creating time-lapse video of Aurora, but there are some limitations I put some details in the description of this video for some advice on shooting in that mode So on to using a GoPro or other action cameras to shoot Aurora a few generations ago GoPro introduced a night time-lapse feature on some of their cameras And this is exactly what we need to use if you can get stars in a photo Aurora is actually kind of easy by comparison for GoPro specifically switch to night time-lapse photo use pro or manual mode in the case of my hero 7 black I used ISO 3200 10 second exposures and auto interval which comes out at around a 5 second wait between exposures This will be fine for stage 1 and 2 Aurora displays, but will likely blow things out at stage 3 GoPros are nice and the fact that they shoot an extremely wide angle and don't need to be focused a GoPro would make a great Second camera quietly shooting a context display while your main cameras are getting those beauty shots. How about a cell phone? I tried using my iPhone 11s night mode to shoot some of the brightest Aurora displays They were terrible yet Apple's own marketing seemed to make it look like it was no sweat being the Apple product It is I need Google to help me figure out how to use it I found a yet another non-intuitive but genius in hindsight feature put the darn thing on a tripod and everything changes 1x Switch to the night mode, which is about three seconds Yes, and I'm gonna set it to the max and once the phone detects that it's on a tripod You'll see it switch from 10 seconds to 30 seconds then gently take your phone. No Don't touch it It'll slowly stack and build that image In camera processing There you have it a really clean iPhone image or how about with a drone yes a Drone, this is a time-lapse created by taking successive images with a DJI Mavic mini to a couple of things There's an LED light at the front of the drone that needs to be disabled or you get that Flashing disco light on top of the image and also this is with all of the settings maxed out Highest ISO and 4 second exposure time The point is aurora photography really can be done on just about any camera you have and with a better drone or a better camera Attached to a big drone I'm sure nice stable clean and relatively noise free time lapses and interesting scenery options aren't out of the question Unfortunately, this is the last clip of my drone version 1 themed to my cell phone before it mysteriously lost power and fell into a lake So I didn't get to try this again up in Alaska with better settings and conditions See the description on this video for a few ideas on what I could have done better and the replacement drone only set me back $450. Um, so totally not related plug or I took these photos way back in 2001 on ISO 1600 film and these way back in 2003 on a Kodak point-and-shoot digital camera If you have a decent point-and-shoot camera made any time in the last 15 years, you can photograph Aurora You just need a tripod and the camera needs to be able to take at least 4 second long images at ISO 3200 or 10 seconds long at 1600 whether or not you can make a time-lapse on that camera is going to be up to Specific features on that camera and you'll have to figure that out There's just too many possible options between manufacturers models and when that camera was new Was that even a feature anyone cared about at the time in other words the older the point-and-shoot camera the less likely to be able To take hands-free consecutive shots that you'd need to make a time-lapse And of course film is still around and provides aesthetically kind of cool images the biggest issue with shooting Aurora on film is Trusting someone to process your film and print your images without ruining one or the other or both. Trust me I have a lot of ruined 20 year old film images of Aurora. Thank you Walmart, and that's why I adopted digital really early I couldn't trust cheap film processing and the cost of processing at places I did trust quickly pushed me into going all digital about 20 years ago If you are interested in making time-lapse video sequences of Northern Lights I have a series of videos on how to do just that and you can watch and skip around in them right now Start here if you're interested. Thanks for watching this one, and I hope you'll enjoy these other ones, too