Aurora Photography

Aurora Photography in New Zealand: A Complete Field Guide to Settings, Forecasting, and Capturing the Southern Lights
Video Tutorials

Aurora Photography in New Zealand: A Complete Field Guide to Settings, Forecasting, and Capturing the Southern Lights

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from standing under a sky full of stars with your camera pointed in the right direction — and getting back nothing but a blurry, noisy mess. Night sky photography has a steep learning curve, and aurora photography adds another layer on top of that: you have to be in the right place, at the right time, with conditions that cooperate. Most of us don’t get many chances to practice.

Chasing the Southern Lights: A Practical Guide to Photographing the Aurora
Video Tutorials

Chasing the Southern Lights: A Practical Guide to Photographing the Aurora

There are photographs you plan for months and still miss, and then there are the ones that find you at 3 a.m. when you were supposed to be asleep. Aurora photography lives entirely in that second category. It rewards the prepared and punishes anyone who decides to call it a night too early. I’ve spent enough sleepless hours chasing the northern lights from the Pacific Northwest that I’ve built up opinions about what actually works out in the field, and when I came across this William Patino tutorial shot in Fiordland, New Zealand, I kept pausing it to take notes.