Northern Lights in Alta, Norway

[PaulTheBoatman]

I'll be leaving soon for a week-long xc ski trip based in Alta, Norway to photograph to northern lights on 4x5. Any suggestions for shooting the northern lights? Right now I just plan on shooting a bunch of pushed HP5+ but would like to shoot some color as well - what film stocks would y'all recommend for what may be a very low light week? Thanks

[Willie]

Shoot color. B&W auroras generally look like clouds. You lose a lot of the wonder without color.

[Leszek Vogt]

The 'lights tend to move and change strength. I looked up my metadata on my better digital shots (for reference), that I took in Alaska and the settings vary from ISO 1000, 1250 to 3200....all at F3.5....the shutter was 13-20 sec. All manually adjusted....if that helps.

[Tin Can]

My local news has been claiming Northern Lights visible in Shawnee Forest for weeks

[PaulTheBoatman]

I was thinking of doing some trichomes, but that will be a bit of a feat with the hour-long exposure times

[bashful]

Paul - to emphasize what Leszek said about the lights changing. I saw them in Yellowknife early this year, and you cannot overestimate how quickly they change. I was sitting in my vehicle at -40C, bemoaning the fact that we'd seen nothing all night, and in two minutes, it had gone from nothing to a glorious display - which had disappeared 15 minutes later. So, unless you bring three cameras, you won't get a meaningful trichrome as the display will certainly be different by the time you finish it.

[Jim Andrada]

Well, you could always recreate the 3 strip technicolor camera. https://www.eastman.org/technicolor/...e-strip-camera

I also doubt you'd get much other than blur if you tried one hour exposures. I've never seen the Northern Lights, but I suspect that the motion is a big part of the experience. Video seems to me to be the appropriate medium in this case.

[r.e.]

Rachel Jones Ross lives in Calgary, Alberta and teaches Northern Lights photography, among other things, at Banff and Jasper national parks. She has done many talks and interviews that are on the internet, including a number for B&H, and she's a member of the Sony Alpha Imaging Collective. A few months ago, she did a detailed, streamed presentation on the subject for a terrific app called PhotoPills. PhotoPills is based in Spain, hence the host's fairly thick accent. His name is Raphael Pons, and he's quite a knowledgeable guy. There's a timestamp for this video, which runs 2 hours, in its YouTube Description. The substance starts just after the 2 minute mark.

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