northernlights

The Northern Lights have been lighting up the sky over Iceland these past few days, and stunning photos of the auroras have been lighting up the Internet.

Capturing the Northern Lights in real time only recently became doable, with beautiful videos like this one popping up to show the potential of cameras that can handle high-ISO with low noise. But the folks at OZZO Photography took this idea to new heights... literally. They strapped a Sony a7S II to a drone and shot the northern lights from the air.

An aurora borealis, sometimes referred to as a polar light, is a natural light display in the sky, predominantly seen in the high latitude regions near the Arctic Circle.

Berlin-based professional adventure photographer Benjamin Jaworskyj was recently flying to a workshop in Norway when he got a chance to test the low-light capabilities of his Sony a7S II: filming the dim Northern Lights in the skies outside.

Watching the aurora borealis dance above your head is a transformative human experience that thousands capture from places like Norway and the Canadian Rockies every year. But watching it dance beneath your feet? That's an experience only a fortunate few will ever get to have.

We’ve all seen those images over the past few years (popping up in our Facebook feeds or in the media) depicting spectacular displays of the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights from Great Britain, Ireland or the lower 48 in the US. Regardless of the location, they’re pretty amazing images.

But beneath the wow-factor and thousands of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ lurks a nasty little integrity issue. These aurora images may be photographic eye-candy, but many of them are pure high fructose corn syrup.

Back in 2013, we shared the work of photographer Richard Gottardo, …

Our sun goes through a solar cycle with an average length of 11 years, and the period of greatest solar activity during each cycle is called the solar maximum. Photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee visited Iceland during the latest solar maximum and shot photos for this dazzling time-lapse film titled "Apotheosis."

Finnish photographer Tiina Törmänen wanted to capture how small and fragile humans are in the unfathomable expanse of space, so she shot a series of stunning self-portraits showing her silhouette dwarfed by a backdrop of stars and the Northern Lights. The series is titled "Wanderer."

If you've always dreamed of taking pictures of the northern lights, the video above will give you a small taste of what it's like. Swedish astrophotographer Göran Strand captured the behind-the-scenes footage recently when he drove out into the wilderness in the dead of night to chase auroras.

Seeing and photographing an aurora is probably on many a photographer’s bucket list, but only a handful …

If you're like us, seeing the Aurora Borealis in person is high on your bucket list... quite possibly right at the top. The idea of watching this spectacular natural light show in real-time is thrilling, and while you don't get there sitting on your couch reading this, the video above by Ole C. Salomonsen of Arctic Light Photo is about as close as you're likely to get without being there in person.

Captured over the course of several months in Norway, Salomonsen has compiled the best of the best real-time footage he was able to capture with the Sony a7S into 5 minutes of northern lights bliss.

Conveying the grandeur of the Aurora Borealis is a serious challenge for a photographer. How are you supposed to capture the splendor of the event, give it a sense of scale, and somehow imbue that photograph with the emotion involved in actually witnessing the polar spirits for yourself?

There probably isn't a magical mixture of ingredients that will yield the ideal northern lights photograph, but the image above by photographer Max Rive is one of the closest we've seen, and he was kind enough to share the details behind it with us.

Most Aurora Borealis videos are time-lapses, because cranking the ISO high enough for bright real-time video would normally result in a noisy mess. That, however, was before cameras like the Sony A7s came along.

The Aurora Borealis (AKA Northern Lights) often makes an appearance in time-lapse videos of the night sky, but have you ever seen what it looks like in real time? That's what Korean astrophotographer Kwon O Chul was able to capture in the video above.

Time-lapse photographer Ole Salomonsen once referred to the aurora borealis as the 'polar spirits,' and characterized their movements as dancing. Well, after seeing the image above by photographer John Chumack we're tempted to conclude that the polar spirits have pets that do some jumping while their parents dance.

Time-lapse photographer Ole C. Salomonsen specializes in the northern lights. But before you skip over this post because you've seen about a billion more aurora time-lapses this month, we suggest you click play and give Ole's work a shot.

Dean J. Tatooles specializes in fine art panoramic landscape photography, wildlife photography, and indigenous portraiture from remote locations around the world. He also works with top-rated travel companies and fellow professional photographers to lead photographic safaris in Iceland, India, Kenya, and more. Fresh off a trip in Iceland, Tatooles and colleague Tim Vollmer answer some common questions about the eerie natural anomaly known as the Aurora Borealis. If shooting the Northern Lights is on your photographic bucket list, be sure to check out their tips below, which have been gathered from years of experience.

Who says you need to travel to exotic locations to capture the aurora borealis in action? Sometimes, all you need is a window seat on a trans-Atlantic flight from London to NYC -- at least that's what happened for one lucky amateur photographer recently when he was treated to one heck of an 'in-flight movie' right outside his airplane window.

French photographer Stephane Vetter is a master of capturing gorgeous photos of landscapes at night. One of his favorite things to shoot are the northern lights (AKA aurora borealis) over Iceland, so many of his long exposure photographs show greenish glows illuminating the sky above.

For over a year now, photographer Shawn Stockman Malone of LakeSuperiorPhoto has been pointing her cameras at the sky over Michigan's Lake Superior and capturing dazzling displays of the Northern Lights.

Photographer Richard Gottardo tells us that he spent a few months in the Rocky Mountains, trying to see and photograph the Northern Lights. A brilliant aurora display finally happened a week ago, and Gottardo's mission was accomplished.

Photographer Ole C. Salomonsen loves shooting the northern lights or, as he calls them, the polar spirits. And for his most recent film he went all out by putting together time-lapse photography of the aurora above cities, in front of starry backgrounds and above gorgeous fjords with a couple of mind-blowing video captures thrown in for good measure.

If you've always wanted to feast your eyes on the aurora borealis but haven't had the time or the money to travel to areas of the world where the light display occurs, photographer Göran Strand has a treat for you. He has created an immersive 360-degree panorama using time-lapse photographs shot during a particularly active aurora. The video lets you pan around in the scene, offering a small taste of what experiencing the northern lights feels like.

Photographer Shannon Bileski of Signature Exposures captured this beautiful photograph last Friday at Patricia Beach in Canada. It shows a bright meteor streaking through a sky filled with the green glow of the aurora borealis.

Auroras are quite popular as a photo subject these days, especially for time-lapse photography, but a team of researchers in Norway recently snapped pictures of one in a way that hasn't been done before: with a hyperspectral camera. The special device can simultaneously capture multiple spectral bands of light. The composite photograph above was created by combining three such bands of light, with each one assigned a different RGB color.

Time-lapse photographer Randy Halverson (whose time-lapse of lightning storms we featured …

Most photographers would be happy to capture a photo showing just the northern lights or lava leaping out of a volcano crater. Photographer James Appleton managed to capture a series of beautiful photographs that show both in the same frame. The images were made at Fimmvörðuháls in Iceland.

Swedish photographer Göran Strand created this amazing "little planet" photo (AKA a stereographic projection) that shows the Aurora Borealis overhead. He titled it "Planet Aurora".