How I Shoot It #4: Northern Light, Aurora Borealis - Aurora Photography

Hello everyone, welcome back to this series of "How I Shoot It". Today, I want to share one of the most difficult photos that I ever take: The Northern Light or Aurora Borealis. Here's the photo:
  

 

  
This picture of Aurora Borealis was taken back in 2013 when I was still using my old trustee Canon EOS 650D. This was my pre Micro Four Thirds era, and this was back in the time where I just started to shoot RAW. Just for your information, I shoot RAW 100% these days, I never shoot JPEG unless I know what I'm doing.
  
The photo was taken at Tromso, Norway. This was my lucky day because we've been waiting for the Northern Light to show up for two days.
 
The concept of this photo is simply just a landscape photo with added layer from the Aurora Borealis, which is essentially Aurora Photography in its simplest form. As with many landscape photo in general, wide-angle focal length is more preferred, and this was no exception.
 

Mechanics of the Photo

Camera Setting

This was shot using Canon EOS 650D, with Tokina 12-24mm f/4 DX lens which I really love. I shoot at 12mm, f/4, ISO 1600, for as long as 30 seconds. Tripod is a must, so not bringing one for this kind of shot is simply killing yourself. Remember to shoot in RAW, this is the kind of picture that requires a lot of pushing/pulling in the post-processing that's simply cannot be done in JPEG. I didn't meter the shot at all, which means I'm guessing the exposure without knowing if it was right or wrong, and all is done in Manual mode (M dial).
  
The white balance goes really crazy with my old 650D, and that is another reason why I shoot RAW. The manual white balance isn't spot on, there is no way to shoot in Kelvin, there's no way to specifically adjust tint/hue separately, and the Auto WB is just pretty much garbage in that camera. If you want to get your WB as close as possible, set the WB to as low as possible (2500K).
 

Technique

Composition wise, rule of thirds is your safest bet. I chose the mountain as my foreground, the Aurora Borealis as my background, and the starry night sky as my background. It's not the best, but it's passable. We didn't scout for the location and just go look for a place outskirt of the town, so we had to make due with whatever composition that was present at that time.
  
As with all wide-angle lens, you'll have to really work yourself to find the composition that you like. On the other hand, you'll have to include at least 2/3 of your frame in Aurora photography for the sky so that the Aurora will stand out in the photograph. The composition rarely works if you have less than 2/3 of the frame for the sky/Aurora. Focal length, again, is also important, anything that's tighter than 24mm on full frame won't easily work, although you can still use it.
  
As I mentioned before, tripod is a must for a 30 second shot. Find a good sturdy tripod that won't shake easily during long exposure shot like this. Your average 20 bucks Excell or Velbon vacation tripod won't cut it, get a nice tripod with good ball-head for the ultimate stability and flexibility. But the shooting session itself shouldn't be your only concern; we spent more time and resource to prepare for the Aurora hunt itself.
  
First, find the country where you want to shoot the Aurora at. Norway has a nice city called Tromso, which was where I shoot this picture, and it's one of a few cities that are actually very close to the actual north pole, which makes it ideal for Aurora photography since Aurora tend to spawn closer to north pole. I believe Finland, Canada, Alaska(US), and some other parts in the world do have similar accessible location that has some Aurora activity.
 
The best time to see Aurora Borealis is around fall or winter on the northern hemisphere of the earth. It will be very active from November to around February. So plan your traveling date accordingly.
 
Before you do the actual shoot, which is usually after the sun set, make sure you scout for the best location on the morning or noon. Keep in mind, during that time, the sun will only available for a few hours everyday. Usually, Aurora photography requires as little ambient light as possible for the Aurora to really shine, but you can get slightly more creative and shoot where there is some ambient light(city light, house light), and blend the exposures. And also take into account the effect of moon light if there's moon present on the night sky. Moon will help to lit the ground, but it will also make stars disappear from the night sky.

The weather will be crazy cold, so dress accordingly, and protect your gear. Bring extra batteries, because in cold weather the battery will die faster. Keep your extra batteries in the pocket, so that they'll stay a bit warmer. Before you actually shoot with your camera, get the camera to the same ambient temperature so that the sensor is cooler and will produce less noise in high ISO.
  

Post Processing

I used Canon Digital Photo Professional app to process the RAW files. This was the days when I haven't use Lightroom yet. I mainly raise the shadow a whole lot in the picture, keep the highlight from blowing out, and use some noise reduction tool to kill the noise at this long-exposure-low-light-high-ISO shot. I manually adjusted the white balance until the color looks good. I don't really remember the setting, but I'm pretty sure it's around 2500K.
 
Shooting RAW is the key here as I mentioned before. If I shot this picture using JPEG, definitely the mountain will lose detail when I raise the shadow, and the highlight can't be controlled which translates to blown-out-overly-bright Aurora. Also the WB can't be corrected with JPEG, and that will cause problems.
  

How To Improve?

As I mentioned before, I didn't really scout for a good location due to the constraint of my travel, so I couldn't get a desired landscape that I want to shoot. If I researched better during the daytime to find the desired landscape, I will probably be able to improve the photo.

My Tokina 12mm isn't as wide as I want it to be, but it was the widest lens that I had at the time. I will probably use my MFT 7mm lens instead right now, or rent/buy a very wide fish eye lens. I couldn't capture as much things in the frame, and it really frustrated me.

I could improve the photo also by adding another element in the shoot, like a person or something. Asking someone to stand still for 30 seconds is impossible, so I would probably use a very low power flash to lit the person and use second curtain sync to get the best result.

I could also go another route and add another landscape element such as the view of a whole city from above shot from a higher ground. I will probably mess up the exposure of the city because 30 seconds exposure will definitely blow out city lights, so if I were to shoot this picture again with the city light included, I will utilize exposure blending technique. That means, I will shoot two different exposures of the same frame and later combine them together using Photoshop or Gimp.

That's all for today's How I Shoot It post, I hope you find this post useful. Until next time, good luck, and keep shooting! God bless you :)