Most mortals don't get to see such a display of light created by nature. Truly, you took beautiful pictures.

You shoot with a 5DMkII, right? What did you do to get the shots? Did you set exposure compensation down to get the shots? How long were you keeping the shutter open? I'll paste your answer in Evernote so that one day, years from now, I can look it up again when I'm preparing for my trip north.

I'll bet I have a pretty good idea of how you felt when you looked at your LCD and histogram after each shot. You start to get a quiet satisfaction that indicates you are very much In The Zone. I could go on, but I'll stop now. So very impressive.

Last edited Fri Mar 9, 2012, 05:41 PM - Edit history (1)

These were shot with the 1 Ds Mark III. I used the 17-40L lens because I wanted to get as wide as I could, and with the moonlight I didn't think I needed the 2.8 speed of the 24-70. I set my infinity focus ahead of time and put it on manual focus, P mode, and right in the middle for the exposure. ISO 400 and the shots were about 20-25 seconds. As bright as it was, I probably could have gotten away with ISO 200, but I didn't get much noise at 400 so it worked out fine.

After I took these shots, of course, the sky REALLY went crazy, but my cable release button got stuck in the on position (as I discovered later). I thought it was my battery that was dead, so we fumbled around for quite a while with that with the problem not resolving, so I got frustrated and we headed home. (Besides, I had to pee. ) I didn't discover until we were on our way home that the problem was in the cable.

Right now it's kind of hazy outside, but hopefully it will clear out tonight and we can try again. Someone said that there was another solar burst which should reach here by Sunday night. We'll be in Nome, which is considerably north of here, so hopefully it'll be clear and not too windy and I can get out on the Arctic Ocean ice pack and get some more nice shots.


ed. Oh, one other thing -- white balance was set to "daylight."

And hoe exciting to get your first northern lights.

in my 37 years. I couldn't believe I was actually getting the reds and indigo blue, which are pretty unusual.

What an experience that must have been.

thanks for all of these wonderful photos.

I'm sure they're more impressive in person, but still............

I can not think of enough adjectives to describe these fabulous photos.

Throughout my life I have been lucky enough to see the northern lights many times, and one can just stare at the sky in awe!