Taking pictures of northern lights any tips

[inman999]

As the title really, off to Iceland in a couple of weeks and I'm still getting to grips with my camera. Camera is a canon 550d with the kit lens and a nifty 50. Cheers.

[davepoth]

IIRC you'll want a tripod, as you'll be looking to do longish exposures.

[Class One]

I've been fortunate to get one or two pics of the Northern Lights.



As said above you'll need a tripod and spare batteries


Iceland Jan 2009 167 by Douglas A.L. Young, on Flickr

Canon 400D 18-55mm ef-s kit lens taken at 27mm f5.6 ISO 800 with a 30sec exposure.If you go longer than 30secs then the background stars begin to blur

Turn your autofocus off and set the lens to near infinity or at infinity if you can and get your aperture to as low as you can go. Also the lower the ISO the less noise you'll
get making for a better picture. Turn your noise reduction option on in your menu. A remote or cable release would be a good idea as well. The above pic was really more luck than any skill involved and I was just fortunate to get that shot. I hope to go back to Iceland in the next year or so with some better kit and really go to town.

Good luck with your trip.

Edited by Class One on Wednesday 21st September 22:27

[ViperDave]

Focusing at night can be tricky, rather than setting to manual and infinity, read up about hyper-focal distances and auto focus on something you can see at a distance that gives you greatest focal range and then set to manual focus and compose the shot being careful not to move the focus ring. If necessary you should be able to light something up with a torch for focusing on in this range.

Compose you shots with high iso (ie get the fore/background where you want it) so you can do it with a shorter shutter time, then set to the lower iso and longer shutter for the lower noise shot.

Take a laptop with you to view the shots on as soon as possible in any down time so you can correct any problems if you get a second show. nothing worse than it looking good on the 2" screen but naff on something bigger.