5 Rookie Mistakes and How to Avoid Them - Northern Lights Photography Tips

today i'm going to share with you five of the most common mistakes we see rookie northern lights photographers make and teach you how to avoid those whether you've never pressed the shutter underneath the sky filled with aurora or you've done it a thousand times i'm hoping that i can teach you at least one or two tips to help you make better aurora photos so grab your pencil and notepad and let's get started i've been shooting the northern lights for 13 years and in that time i've spent thousands of hours out underneath the aurora and i've made just about every mistake that you can imagine so today i hope to help teach you some of those mistakes and help you avoid them if you've done night sky photography this might seem obvious but for those of you who haven't a tripod is an absolute must a good solid ball head tripod is always preferable it gives you a lot of leeway and it's easier to adjust in the dark where you can't see things very well if you're off level really helps make things easy check out our video about what gear you need to photograph the northern lights for more details on the tripods that we recommend another thing that's critically important is to either use the self timer or a shutter release there's a variety of different types of shutter releases you can get from ones like this that plug into your camera or the wireless kind both types work really well and i'll link to them in the description below another thing that may not be so obvious is that you want to turn steady shot image stabilization vibration reduction ibis whatever your manufacturer calls it make sure that's turned off because what happens is the camera is trying to stabilize the image and when you're doing a long exposure if the camera thinks for whatever reason that it's detecting a little bit of motion it will actually start to move around your sensor or lens elements or a combination of those and it will blur your shots rather than help them so if you're on a tripod go ahead and turn it off if you're handheld it's really helpful but for night shots we turn that off next thing you want to take into consideration for night photography is that you're not going to be able to auto focus if you've never tried that go out in the dark and try your autofocus sometime it usually doesn't work very well especially for what we're focusing on which is the stars in the sky so what you want to do is pop your camera into manual focus mode once you're in manual focus mode you want to use your magnifier to zoom in on a star or some light source way off in the distance at least 10 meters or further away and then once it's magnified you want to rack that focus ring back and forth ever so slightly until that object becomes nice and tack sharp once it's sharp you're in focus if you're on a mirrorless camera you want to make a note of where that focal mark is because you're going to want to duplicate that mirrorless cameras if you pull the battery out if you have to do a battery swap that focus point resets itself and so you're going to need to remember where that spot was so i just make a mental note of that if you're shooting a dslr it's a little bit easier because you've got the focal marks on your lens and it will stay there even if you turn the camera off and some lenses canon l glass in particular is great because it's what we call parafocal meaning that as you zoom in and out throughout the focal range unlike say the 16 to 35 it will maintain that focus point throughout that focal distance so if i'm at 16 millimeters when i set my focus i can zoom in all the way to 35 millimeters and that focus point will maintain where it should be on most other lenses that is not the case they are not parafocal so sony lenses the nikon 14 to 24 for example and many others are not parafocal so if you're using a wide angle zoom and you do change your focal length you're going to need to change your focus point so get really good and practiced at doing that manual focus maneuver at night because it's going to come in really handy if you're having to change that focal length if you do have one of the parafocal lenses then what we like to do is take a piece of gaff tape and tape the focus ring in place if you're shooting a mirrorless or a nikon or something like that that's not part of focal then don't tape it down if you have not taped it down and you don't have one of those parafocal lenses be sure to periodically magnify in on your images and check your stars and make sure they're sharp the telltale sign of a new night sky photographer is out of focus stars so make sure that doesn't happen to you don't forget about good composition that sounds obvious but it's not a lot of folks come out and they photograph the aurora for the first time and maybe we get a nice corona which is an aurora that rains down on us from directly overhead and when it happens a lot of people tend to just point their cameras straight up and they take pictures of that corona and it's beautiful colors in the sky but quite honestly it's a bit boring because there's not anything to anchor that shot and give us a sense of perspective think of your aurora photography as landscape photography with sky and aurora in it rather than just aurora photography and you'll get much better shots and just like with landscape photography generally not a good idea to put your horizon line right across the middle of the frame you typically want this on one third or the other third and speaking of use the rule of thirds in your composition i'm going to show you a few examples here so have a look at these and take this as a guideline [Music] most modern cameras have a rule of thirds guides either through the evf or on the back display so use that to your advantage and make sure that you're setting up your composition using that rule of thirds another compositional tool i like to use and actually prefer over the rule of thirds is the golden ratio and that's because in nature the golden ratio appears repeated throughout everything we see in nature it's very prevalent and so by composing with the golden ratio in nature photos i personally feel that it gives a more natural look and a more pleasing look so you can use that as well it's close to the rule of thirds but it's a little bit off that one there isn't a guide for typically in most cameras and so what you want to do is kind of use maybe lightroom with a golden ratio overlay and kind of crop your photos and adjust and play with it and kind of get that stuck in your head so that when you're out shooting you see that composition naturally also place your main dominant subjects on those intersecting lines where the rule of thirds kind of cross over each other that's always a great idea here's a good example of that and then finally don't forget that you can turn that camera and shoot vertical and in fact a lot of times with the aurora you should what i like to do is let the aurora dictate that for me if it's kind of low and going across the horizon then i tend to shoot horizontal if it's going up overhead and i can make a better composition with more aurora i'll turn the camera and then i can get a little bit of the foreground in the bottom and still feature the aurora very prominent just like this another common mistake that we see is people using filters for aurora photography and that is a big mistake because some filters even uv filters can create what we call newton's rings newton's rings occur when you have a flat piece of glass over a curved piece of glass and you get reflections between the two elements and it causes images that look like this they're way beyond my technical abilities to remove and photoshop and so it's just better to avoid them not all filters will cause this but plenty do and especially particularly with the aurora it's an issue so if you're shooting aurora or just night sky images in general for me personally i just remove all filters there's no reason to use them and so i take them off another setting that we see overlooked all too often but that you don't want to miss is long exposure noise reduction long exposure noise reduction is a really useful feature to have in some cases but it's not helpful for northern lights photography so a place where i might use that is say i'm in death valley in the middle of july where it's maybe 90 degrees fahrenheit at night and i'm photographing the milky way doing long exposures during that time what happens is my camera sensor gets extremely hot and it starts to produce hot pixels or long exposure noise if i turn long exposure noise reduction on the camera will solve that issue for me but how it does it is the issue for us with northern lights photography so let's say i'm doing a 20 second exposure of the milky way and i have that setting turned on the camera is going to take my shot just as i asked it for 20 seconds then it's going to close the camera's shutter curtain and it's going to take another photo but it's going to be a black photo of the back of the shutter that's going to allow it to find all of those little hot pixels and then remove them from the original image but it has to duplicate that shutter time so your 20 second exposure becomes a 40 second exposure and then a little bit of time for processing it's a brilliant setting and it's going to save you a lot of work in post-production but it's not useful for northern lights photography and the reason for that is most of the time we're photographing northern lights we're in a cold enough environment that we don't typically see those hot pixels and so what you're really doing is just eliminating half the shots that you could be taking so if the aurora only lasts for say two minutes you're you're only getting half the shots by having that setting on so by turning it off you can get twice as many shots and capture every moment of that fast moving aurora now i should mention some manufacturers do call this slow shutter noise reduction there's a couple of other different names for it but look it up in your manufacturer's manual and not all cameras separate this function from high iso noise reduction so when you're looking at your noise reduction settings you're looking for one of two there should be long exposure noise reduction and high iso noise reduction they are separate things and so if your camera only shows noise reduction go ahead and leave it turned on especially if you're shooting jpeg because that will also clean up the high iso noise now guys this is by no means intended to be a fully exhaustive course on northern lights photography but if you would like to learn more and you'd like to get in deep with this and you'd like to learn step by step how to set up your particular camera and lens we are now offering online photography workshops to help you set up your gear we will be doing those every saturday and you can find a link to those in the description below or even better if you're able to come up to fairbanks this spring or next fall or sometime in the future hop on up and join us for a tour and we'll guide you in person step by step but if you don't happen to be able to do that you still want to try your hand at this and you want to learn sign up for one of our online courses and we'll walk you through your particular setup and help you get ready to photograph northern lights did you guys learn anything any of you veterans learn anything new how about you beginners did we teach you a couple of tricks to get you started let us know in the comments below and if you have something to add to any of that let us know that as well we're always interested to see what you guys have to say if you learned anything new guys do hit that like button it really does help us out with this youtube algorithm and like i always mention in every video that helps us be able to keep creating this kind of content so hit that like button leave a comment hit the subscribe button if you haven't already that kind of stuff really does help us out and we really appreciate it sincerely we post a new video each week sometimes it's about how the northern lights work sometimes it's beautiful footage of the aurora and sometimes it's tips and tricks or camera reviews or things like that so there's always something new to check out every week and on that topic next week i'm going to be talking about proper etiquette when viewing the aurora and when photographing it unfortunately that is something that is not taught to a lot of folks and it's something that you probably should know when you're going out there how to behave responsibly and not interfere with other people's enjoyment and photography of the northern lights so we'll cover that in detail next week all right guys that's going to do it for me today thanks so much and we'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: The Aurora Chasers

Views: 54,284

Keywords: 5 Rookie Mistakes and How to Avoid Them - Northern Lights Photography Tips, 5 mistakes to avoid when photographing the Northern Lights, Northern Lights Photography Tip, Rookie mistakes to avoid, How to Photograph the Northern LIghts, Northern Lights Photography, Northern Lights, 5 tips for better Northern Lights Photography, 5 things you should know about photographing the Northern Lights, Take better Northern Lights photographs, improve your northern lights photography

Id: zPUt4uL5awU

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020