Two days after being violently shot out of our Sun, sub-atomic particles glissade through the atmosphere over Norway adding a tinge of green to the summer twilight sky.
We were incredibly lucky on our trip to have an auroral display bright enough to be visible even where the sun had set a short while earlier. This has been the only time I've seen the afterglow of sunset, the colours of twilight and the green and purple of the northern lights in a single scene.
One of the hardest things to do when taking a photograph of the aurora (other than trying not to get too excited and messing up your settings!) is to ensuring that you have a good composition. It's too easy to be mesmerized by the dramatic show going on overhead and only take a picture upwards without any environmental context, but without such context, it's difficult for a viewer to get a holistic appreciation of the scene.
This is harder than it sounds as most of the time the aurora only shows up when it's very dark and so any foreground is also very dark. You can work around this using artificial light or be lucky with a dim moon on the oppsite side to the aurora, but my preferred approach is to find a reflective surface like snow or ice, or even better liquid water in a lake or puddle. The problem with liquid water is that it tends to ripple which mar any clean reflections, which mean that using the sea is usually quite hard. In order to get this photo, I walked a short distance away from the beach and positioned my camera near a small puddle. By using a wide lens and lowering the camera, I managed to make the small puddle large enough to balance out the composition and hopefully provide interest to the viewer in all parts of the frame.
Utakleiv beach, Lofoten, Norway, 2016
Sony a7R Mark II with Samyang 14mm f/2.8 UMC
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