How to Photograph the Northern Lights: A Beginner's Guide

If you've ever pointed your camera at the northern lights and gotten back a black rectangle, or a blurry green smear that looks nothing like what your eyes just saw, you haven't done anything wrong with your photography. You've just been using daytime settings for a nighttime sky. Aurora photography runs on three deliberate choices: a wide-open aperture, a shutter speed measured in seconds instead of fractions of a second, and manual focus set before the sky gets dark. Get those three right and almost any camera with a manual mode can capture it, including many phones.

Fall is a genuinely good season to try this. Around the September and March equinoxes, Earth's magnetic field lines up with the sun's in a way that makes it easier for solar particles to slip through and light up the sky. Scientists call this the Russell-McPherron effect, and it's a real, measurable pattern, not folklore, which is part of why aurora sightings tend to cluster in fall and late winter. If you're in Alberta, AuroraWatch (run out of the University of Alberta) is worth bookmarking. It tracks geomagnetic activity in real time and will give you a far better sense of tonight's odds than scrolling social media for other people's photos.

The three settings that actually matter

Forget the dozen dials on your camera for a second. For aurora, only three settings are doing real work, and they're the same three you'd adjust for any low-light shot: the exposure triangle, just pushed to its extremes.

Aperture: as wide open as your lens allows, f/2.8 or f/4 if you have it, or the smallest f-number your kit lens offers. This isn't the place to stop down for depth of field; you want every bit of light your glass can gather.

Shutter speed: somewhere between about 8 and 20 seconds is a reasonable starting point. A slower, dimmer aurora can handle a longer exposure. A fast-moving, bright display needs a shorter one, or you'll lose the ribbon-like structure and end up with a flat green haze instead. If your photos look like a blob of colour with no shape, that's usually the first thing to shorten.

ISO: start around 1600 and adjust from there, going up to 3200 or higher only if the aperture and shutter speed are already maxed out for the conditions. Raising ISO before you've opened the aperture all the way is one of the most common beginner mistakes. It adds digital noise you didn't need to add.

Treat these as starting points, not fixed rules. Check your screen after the first frame, look at the histogram if your camera shows one, and adjust one setting at a time.

Getting your focus right in the dark

Autofocus will hunt uselessly in the dark, so this has to happen manually, and ideally before the sun goes down. Switch your lens to manual focus, point it at something far away (a distant streetlight, the edge of the treeline, anything roughly at infinity), and focus on it while you can still see clearly through the viewfinder or screen. Once it's sharp, don't touch the focus ring again. Some photographers put a small piece of tape across the ring so it can't shift by accident while they're fumbling with gloves on. If you arrive after dark with no daylight focus point available, use your camera's live view, zoom in digitally on the brightest star you can find, and adjust manually until it's a tight point rather than a fuzzy blob.

Gear: what you actually need (and don't)

A tripod is non-negotiable. At shutter speeds measured in seconds, even the steadiest hands will blur the shot, and camera shake at night looks different, and worse, than the everyday blur we've covered in other common causes of blur. Beyond that, you don't need to buy anything new to try this. A wide-angle lens with a fast aperture helps, because it gathers more light and fits more sky in frame, but our full camera guide makes the same point that applies here: knowing how to use the camera you have will get you further than upgrading gear you don't know how to use yet. If you're shooting on a phone, use Night Mode, brace it against something solid or use a small phone tripod, and expect softer results than a dedicated camera, but a usable, shareable photo all the same.

One gear note specific to cold Alberta nights: batteries drain fast in the cold. Bring a spare and keep it in an inner pocket, close to your body, rather than in a camera bag sitting in the trunk.

Common mistakes worth knowing before you go

A few patterns show up again and again in first attempts: pushing ISO high before opening the aperture, using an exposure so long that the aurora's shape smears into a plain green wash, and slowly losing color detail because the exposure blew out the green channel (if your camera shows a histogram, watch for it spiking hard against the right edge). None of these ruin the night, they're just worth a second look between frames rather than shooting fifty photos with the same mistake repeated in every one.

Tonight's exercise

You don't need aurora in the sky to practice. Tonight, after dark, take your camera outside, set it to manual mode, and photograph anything dim and still: string lights, a streetlamp, the moon. Practice the daylight-focus-and-tape trick during your next daytime outing, and check AuroraWatch (or your regional equivalent) before you head to bed. When a real display does show up, you'll already know your settings instead of guessing in the cold and the dark.

If you want this kind of shooting to become second nature rather than a once-a-year scramble, night photography is one of the five modules inside Photography In Focus, alongside exposure, motion, landscapes, and portraits. And if you're newer to your camera altogether and want a gentler starting point, join the waitlist for our free 5-Day Photo Challenge. It's built for exactly this stage, where the goal is confidence with your settings before anything else.