A Once-in-a-Lifetime Moment: Photographing the Aurora in California

Hello friends and welcome to a very special landscape photography vlog because in this video we capture once-in-a-lifetime images of the aurora over California. I share my thought process and techniques and one of the most incredible photo shoots of my entire life. I really hope you enjoy watching. Well hello everyone and welcome to a strange setting for a vlog. I promise this isn't the whole video. We're gonna chase the northern lights in California. I've mapped out where the location faces north so that I can see the northern lights because chances are from California we're not going to get it overhead. If we do see anything it's probably going to be a faint glow right off the northern horizon and I think if I can get that it'll be a beautiful complement to the composition that I found which is this sweeping shoreline that I've photographed before. Never photographed it with northern lights before so just have to see. Do you know what? We're looking pretty good today with the weather not seeing any clouds and if I don't get it well you'll just uh I guess watch me fail on camera and everyone who did get the aurora can point and laugh and say haha. While driving out I was really excited about the shoot and had a feeling it was going to be a very unique night but I was completely unprepared for just how unbelievable this night would actually be. All right so we have made it to the location still a little bit of light on the horizon not a bit of fog in sight. Check this out. All we need is a little bit of northern light glow in the sky up there. Well let's get out there set up and see what we can see. So we are out here it's almost dark enough to potentially shoot the northern lights. Not entirely sure if uh they'll show up or not but let's go ahead and look through the viewfinder and I'll show you what I'm composing here. So look at that. I feel like I can see a little bit of green out there right? But what I was thinking about doing is a nice long exposure here. There is still some light on the horizon though so I think once that's gone this should be a lot darker. We should see the see the stars start to appear and I figured what would be nice about this spot is if the northern lights were right on the horizon like right on the very tip of the horizon. This is pretty much like a clean, clean, it's pretty much as clean of a horizon as you can get. Just like a straight line but I love the way the shoreline separates the land. This right now is at about 28 millimeters but I could always zoom in too and try something a little tighter. We'll just have to see what happens honestly. That's all we can do. I think the moon is going to set off on the horizon too so that could be an interesting thing to focus on as well. Right now if you're wondering what camera and lens I'm using, I'm using the Sony A1 here and then I also have the Tamron 28 to 200 millimeter which has kind of been my go-to lens lately. I think I'm going to do like a nice clean 20 second exposure f4 ISO 1600. Let's see what we got here. Wow, that is crazy. So here's my first shot of that beautiful sweeping view and even though the aurora was subtle here, I loved that glowing strip of green you had in the sky. I also really liked the remnants of sunset down towards the horizon and how you still had some reflected glow on the Yeah that's, that's, that's the northern lights over Point Reyes. Wow, that is crazy. In order to focus I'm using live view and what I like to do is zoom in to 100 percent on either a light out there in the distance or a star. All right so for this one I'm going to do a 30 second exposure f5.6 at ISO 100 at ISO 800. Let's see how this one turns out. So here's another photograph that I took more as a reference than anything else but you can really start to see the aurora coming through here. The green on the horizon was getting more intense and I started seeing this incredible red glow right around the moon. So I thought it would be fun to do this four image panorama starting from left to right and then stitching all the images in photoshop. One really important thing I wanted to address when it comes to northern lights photography is shutter speed. Generally for these shots especially when the aurora is a little bit more subtle I found that a really long exposure works quite nicely but if you're in the northern latitudes and you're experiencing a really intense aurora storm you can get away with a much shorter exposure. For example here's one taken with just a two second shutter speed and when it comes to time lapse I like to shoot quicker shutter speeds to keep my interval down to one to two seconds because any slower than that and I found that the aurora moves way too fast. So your settings are really going to depend on how powerful the aurora is and where you're viewing it from. It's always a good idea to take a few variations some with different ISOs and some with different shutter speeds and then pick the shots that worked best when you get back home. So the aurora looks incredible right now and I decided to set up a time lapse here. I'm doing a really really high ISO and doing like a 1.6 second exposure so that I can do a two second interval so that I can see some of the motion and the pillars and and some of the changes in there. I was already pretty shocked just witnessing the northern lights over the California coast but little did I know the aurora was just barely making its first appearance and later in the night I would witness something that would leave me completely speechless. All right well we are back at my car because there is a slight change of plan here. So I got a lot of really cool stuff at that viewpoint. I got a time lapse. I got some photographs. I noticed that some of the pillars in the sky were kind of fading and I realized I kind of did everything I could do over there. So I decided to drive to another position and we're gonna do a very short hike to yeah another vantage point to see if we can get more beautiful northern lights. Yeah I'm gonna pack my stuff and we'll see how this other view looks. Nothing like a peaceful coastal night hike. It's all misty. Got the tall grass which probably is infested with ticks. I can hear actually the elephant seals as well out in the out in the distance. I can hear them howling which is pretty cool. A little spooky though. I'm not gonna lie. At the end of this hike I noticed that the moon was setting really fast over the horizon so I rushed to set up my composition and here's what I shot. This photo right here was quite a gamble to take given that I'm facing west instead of north but I had a feeling that red glow around the moon would be a really cool thing to focus on. I also thought it was interesting that this image was almost broken up by three different strips. It almost looks like these cliffs are part of different dimensions. The blue sky on the left side, the red glow around the moon, and then those vivid pink pillars starting to appear. For this photograph I switched over to my 16-35 lens and I did a nice 30 second exposure at f4 and iso 3200 and then I used the denoise feature in Lightroom to clean up the single exposure. This is crazy. You can see it even in my little pocket camera. Oh my god. This is the craziest thing. There's just massive pillars. Holy. Oh my god. One of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed in my entire life. So I decided to set up a time lapse here just to get like a clean reflection of the water with these pillars dancing in the sky and right now because they're so vivid and so intense I'm doing a 0.8 of a second exposure at f2.8 iso 12800 with the a7s and then I'm doing a one second interval. These moments underneath the dancing pillars of the northern lights were absolutely euphoric. My jaw was completely on the floor as I frantically tried to get enough motor skills to click the shutter. After composing myself I did manage to wander back to the other spot to capture some of these photographs and I'm really happy with the way these turned out. These were all shot with my 16-35 lens at the wider end because of how massive these pillars were I used f4 iso 800 and a 20 to 30 second shutter speed. The hardest part about these images was really the post-processing. The colors were so vivid in the raw files out of the camera sensor that they were almost out of gamut so I spent a lot of time trying to neutralize the white balance and really subdue the colors to give them more of a pastel look. The next evening it was predicted that more aurora could show up in California so I decided to pack my bags and head back out. Well everyone it is day number two of uh chasing this crazy aurora storm that we have here in the in the world and uh unfortunately today I have kind of struck out so I drove about uh two and a half hours to uh to a new spot with these beautiful oak trees that I thought would be perfect to kind of silhouette with the uh with the aurora but unfortunately yeah I'm just not seeing anything out here which it happens it was a gamble coming out here and yeah so now I have to make that call of do I have the energy to try and go somewhere else or am I gonna call it and go home so that's what I'm debating right now probably take five minutes have a snack and then kind of decide what the rest of this night looks like so unfortunately I was not able to witness the aurora on this evening but I tried to make the most out of the situation by capturing the moon set right next to that oak tree and here's my shot so this image was shot at about 400 millimeters and even though it's not my best composition in the world it was a really beautiful moment to witness and that's the reality of being a landscape photographer sometimes you plan a shoot and things go exactly as planned like in my previous evening and then you have other times like this where if you want to enjoy yourself you're gonna have to improvise but the more you get out there and take pictures the more possibilities you give yourself to see interesting events like this so anytime you do have the chance to go don't miss that opportunity just go for it with that I really hope you enjoyed this video if you did enjoy it please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel for more and yeah I'll catch you in the next one