11/01/2026
I thought I would do a 'behind the scenes' post about my northern lights photo if anyone's interested. Hopefully it might offer some encouragement to beginners (or remind any gear geeks that you don't need all the latest kit to take good photos! 😄).
I'll start with that last point. The camera used was a Canon 7D (released in 2009 so pretty old tech by today's standards!) and edited with an early version of Photoshop elements (Version 6) which came pre-installed on a Windows Vista laptop! All about 15 years old now!
If you've ever tried taking a similar photo but it came out like one of the thumbnails on the left no matter how much you fiddled around with the camera settings, don't rush to blame yourself or the camera! The reality is, sometimes it's just not possible to capture all the detail in a single shot, even if our eyes can see it. Another example would be a sunrise or sunset. Perhaps the sky looks all washed out or the sky is great but there's absolutely no detail in the foreground. (I'll try to do a more detailed post on those scenarios in future).
The end result here is a blend of several exposures of the same scene, some of which are shown on the left. The mist around the lights was something of a nightmare! Mist and long exposures are not a good mix and as you can see from the bottom 2 thumbnails the lights are just a big white blob and ruin the pictures, but to get the lights even looking something like right, there's no colour in the sky and no detail in the buildings (top thumbnail)! I won't bore anyone with the full details but let's just say this required the use of radial graduated filters in the editing process. If you know you know, if you don't know but want to find out more you can look it up and if you don't know and don't really care then perhaps you've not even read this far! 😄.
Maybe your phone appears able to do it in a single shot, say in HDR mode but that will be doing something similar, processing/manipulating the images behind the scenes!
