A Field Guide to Photographing the Northern Lights

There are few natural phenomena that capture the imagination as much as the aurora borealis. For most landscape photographers, photographing the northern lights is a bucket-list shot.

However, predicting and photographing auroras can be very challenging. There is a lot of science behind understanding the activity of the sun and how that solar activity interacts with the earth’s geomagnetic field to produce the northern lights.

Knowing when auroras are likely to happen is only part of the equation, however. You also need to draw on a variety of techniques to capture auroras as the available light changes with the moon phase, urban glow and the strength of the northern lights as they dance across the sky.

Join Rachel Jones Ross for a presentation on some of the science behind predicting the northern lights at different latitudes, as well as a discussion on in-field techniques for capturing the phenomenon. Rachel will talk about everything from camera settings to single image capture, stacking for focus and for noise reduction, as well as blending.