How to take great video of the northern lights

Nikon magazine: First of all, Göran, tell us about the gear you use, and what you’d recommend for filming the aurora.

Göran Strand: Well, I have a Nikon Z6III, which is a fantastic all-rounder as a camera. For lenses, my advice is use the fastest lens you have. I mostly use the NIKKOR Z 20mm f/1.8 S, and I’ve also used the NIKKOR Z 35mm f/1.2 S, which is an extremely good lens. But basically, you want the fastest lens you can afford for real-time footage. For timelapse you can get away with a less fast lens, such as an f/2.8, because it’s on the tripod with longer shutter speed.

Is it better to capture timelapse or real time?

It depends on the activity. Some auroras are really bright and active, and they move quite fast. Then you would want to capture them in real time. But sometimes the light is quite stable, doesn’t move much or increase in intensity, and then timelapse would be better.

So for timelapse what would the settings be?

Everything is fully manual. Usually I would take some test clips first, to get the exposure right. Let’s say four seconds shutter speed, at ISO 3200. Then set up interval filming in the menu. If I have an exposure time of four seconds I’ll set the interval to six seconds to give the camera time to save each image. Then I set the number of frames to maximum and just keep it running as long as is needed. However, it will depend on how active the aurora is. If it becomes really active, I might go down to one-second exposure to reduce blur.

Can that changing nature of the aurora make a constant exposure difficult?

Yes, because when you start, the northern lights might be quite faint and stable, and then 15 minutes later they can be super active and super bright, and then everything is overexposed, so you have to watch for changing lighting conditions. When they change, take some more test clips just to make sure your exposure is correct.

Are there other key menu settings that people need to watch out for?

Make sure you have long exposure noise reduction turned off. This is where if you take, say, a ten-second exposure, the camera will then take a ten-second black exposure to reduce noise. You want that turned off, otherwise you lose half the time under the stars!

What about speed of the final video? How do you make that creative choice?

I would say it’s often better to go slower, because if it’s too fast it can be difficult to relate to if you’ve seen the lights. But sometimes if you have a dull northern lights with barely any movement, like a constant arc in the sky, it can be good to speed it up because then you can get the movement of the stars in and add another dynamic.

What about settings for real time video, when there’s a really active aurora?

Often it would be at a 1/25 shutter speed, aperture wide open and high ISO. There’s no need to be scared of high ISO with modern cameras, and the Nikon Z6III is the best I’ve ever used. Filming at high ISO actually produces a really clean image and I’m usually at 51,200. If things get brighter, I reduce the ISO but keep the aperture and shutter speed the same.

There’s often a compositional element to your work, rather than just the sky. How important is that?

Well, you can affect the foreground and you can affect the background, but you can’t affect the northern lights! So a good tip is to go out during the daytime and find a place where there is an interesting composition or foreground that will make the image look perfect, because you never know what’s going to happen in the sky or where it will happen. Maybe seven times out of ten you don’t get the perfect footage, but three times you will. And sometimes the lights are directly overhead, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Is that unpredictability one of the things that you enjoy, or is it just a frustration?

I would say it’s both! You can go out for an entire night and come back with nothing. But I’ve been capturing the northern lights for 20 years and I never tire of it, because you never know what you’re going to get.

Göran’s top tips for beginners

• Practise setting up your camera before you go out
  “It’s a common problem for people who go out in the dark for the first time to find it a little difficult to find the buttons on the camera. The best thing is to do a lot of practice inside setting up your camera, changing focus – really know your camera inside and out. And then practise with gloves on! Otherwise, people get out in the cold and dark and get frustrated trying to change settings, and frustration is not a good recipe for a good clip.”
  
  
• Push ISO to the max
  “The noise quality is so good at high ISO in cameras now, so feel free to try the most extreme values and see if you like the result, especially for real-time footage. Then you can always notch it down a little. You don’t have to wait for the northern lights; you can just do it outside in your backyard in the dark.”
  
  
• Prioritise aperture over focal length
  “Especially for real-time video, an aperture of f/1.8 is probably a minimum. But that doesn’t have to cost a lot. Something like the NIKKOR Z 50mm f/1.4 is super good. Of course, the northern lights are so big that a wide angle is great, but with something like the 50mm you can always find interesting parts of the display to focus on.”
  
  
• Keep looking around
  “If you see lights on the horizon, it’s always worth looking all around you. I’ve been in lots of workshops where people are really happy with what’s happening in front of them, but don’t realise there’s a huge corona directly above!”
  
  
• Use your phone to predict and confirm activity
  “There are apps for your phone that can alert you to when there might be aurora activity in your area, and they can be really useful. The other thing is that the aurora can be pretty faint to the naked eye because the human eye isn’t that good at night vision, so to check you can just point your phone at the sky and it will show you whether the lights are there. Then you can get your camera and have fun recording the show.

For more info on taking stills of the aurora see here.