As a photographer who loves landscape photography there are certainly a lot of landmarks to see and shoot. But then there are those natural wonders that are even more enticing. Certainly one of these is Aurora Borealis.
Everyone interested in Aurora Borealis knows that NOW IS THE TIME TO GO AND SEE THEM! So my daughter who is into photography went ahead and booked a Northern Light photo tour with Hurtigruten and Frank Wolliger a German photographer. Well it goes without mention – I could not let her go on her own – so I booked the same tour 😉
As it goes with nature, things don’t always develop as planned. The weather was good for only a day and a half and the rest of the six day tour was rainy with constantly overcast skies. Nevertheless, we were lucky enough to see Northern Lights of a magnitude (i’m not sure it that is the correct term) of between 2 – 3 for about 15 Min. But we were on a ship! And exactly during the “lightshow” the ship bounced quite heavily on the waves and shooting the light was quite a challenge. Only 2 out of a total of 65 photos I shot were useable at the end. You find them below.
To capture the beauty of the light I used the following camera settings and tools. Manfrotto tripod, cable release, Canon EOS5D Mark III, EF14mm 2.8 lens, aperture set at 2.8, ISO 3200 and between 3s to 6s exposure Time. Now I realize that one would suggest to use longer exposure times of up to 1o or even 15 sec and if possible try to reduce ISO to 1600 or less. Our challenge however, was to get the time as short as possible as the ship was constantly in motion. This would not have been a problem with the capture of the lights, but there was that beautiful star sky as well. You can imagine how the stars looked on most of the pictures with longer exposure times on a bouncing ship!
Norway is such a beautiful country that even without Northern Lights one can capture beautiful sceneries. The light (if there is any in December – the days are extremely short the further north one goes – we had days with 1.5h hours of daylight only!). is fantastic. 2 – 3 hours of beautiful sunrise/sunset light! Just perfect!
Now I hope you enjoy the photos even if there are only a couple with Aurora Borealis . By the way – we were told that the light we’ve seen was a rather rare form with colors ranging from green to red! Sounds good to me – that certainly makes the 15 Min lightshow even more precious 😉 We certainly enjoyed the majestic feeling when seeing Northern Light for the first time in life!