Lofoten Aurora
In March of 2023 I went with the excellent Steve Bell and two other very amiable fellow photographers to the Lofoten Islands on the far North Western tip of Norway. This was a trip that had been planned for 2 years, and was designed to coincide with a forecasted peak in aurora activity.
The problem with photographing auroras is that a good aurora has to coincide with a clear night sky for any decent shots to be obtained. For the first 5 days of our 8 day stay we got either good weather or good aurora activity, but never both. However the vastly experienced Steve B was convinced our time would come, and indeed it did on the night of 23 March 2023. That night in Lofoten was one of the greatest aurora displays of the past decade, and certainly I never expect to see anything like it again. What I hadn’t expected was how fast things changed, as huge light displays across hundreds of kilometres of the night sky would suddenly appear, all around us, to be rapidly replaced by something completely different. I’ve never felt so lucky to be somewhere at a specific moment in time.
Unlike static night sky shots like the Milky Way, where many shots are taken and combined to reduce the noise, aurora photographs are single shot images because the content moves so fast. I used On1 Photo Raw which is normal “non-astro” software. I set the colour balance to obtain a dark blue night sky background and enhanced large details in the aurora areas, and all the colours you see fall out of those settings. I took 300 keepers that night, and I present the best 30 or so here. I hope you like them.
Photographs in this album include: Skagsanden beach aurora, Avløysinga bridge aurora, Hamnoy Aurora, Steffenakken Aurora, Djupfjorden Aurora, and more.
For camera settings, techniques and equipment used in shoots like this, see the Technique posts on mcaughtry.photo.