Just A Man With A Camera

My wife has been asking me for the longest time for us to go out and try to photograph the northern lights.  She follows Facebook groups, and I think has an app that tracks the KPI so you can know your chances of seeing them. I don't get that excited about them, and I know exactly why: I grew up on a farm and on a regular basis could see them from my backyard.  It became nothing special because I saw them so frequently. Also, one of the problems has always been that we don't know anywhere close by to go and attempt to shoot considering that we live in a city and that's not exactly conducive to being able to see them. However, by chance on last weekend not only did we stumble upon a place on the edge of the city where we may have some luck shooting, and that night the chances of seeing the aurora were very high.

Now, I've never really put any effort into shooting the the lights, and don't have much experience and luck shooting stars(although I really like the idea of it). That being said, it seems like everyone on social media posts a blurry photo of streaks of light whenever it's in the news that you can see them, so I'd may as well take a shot at it myself if I'm going to call myself a photographer. 

Considering we were still technically in the city, and it was only about 11pm, I wasn't expecting much if I'm being honest, but I'm actually pretty happy with how a few of these turned out.  There wasn't much for purples, but the greens came out nicely.  It was very much a trial and error sort of shooting.  After setting my my framing and establishing a subject in the foreground, I shot wide open at f2.8, 12mm, ISO 800, and then just played with shutter speeds until I found something I liked.

I could have just pointed my camera up at the sky, focused to infinity and shot, but I was happy we were able to actually find a couple locations where there was something in the foreground for reference.  I really like this last one, because it shows off the vastness of the night sky over this farmhouse.  This was a fun challenge for me to do something a little different, and get myself off the couch and out of the house at midnight on a random Sunday night.  Monday morning alarm clock be damned, I had a night sky to shoot.  Even if I walked away from this with not a single frame I was remotely happy with, it was a nice reason to get out and get some reps in.  It just so happens that I do really like this last photo, and now we have a spot scouted for more nights like this.