We fulfilled a bucket-list desire to see the Northern Lights and I was pleased to get some reasonable images from the ship.

Taking photographs of the Northern Lights is pretty easy if you have a tripod.

I took these with a Fuji X100, full open aperture (f2.0), on aperture priority with a -2 stops exposure adjustment (otherwise the photos are too bright for nighttime)

However, photos of the Northern Lights are always more impressive than what you can actually see with the naked eye. It isn't that the camera lies; it's just a fact that it's far more sensitive to colours in the dark than the human eye.

I took three of my images and dialled back the colour saturation and brightness to try and reflect what I actually saw.

To the naked eye, the most impressive display that we saw wasn't any more colourful; the Northern Lights appeared over nearly half the visible sky. Unfortunately, the ship was moving around more and there was noticeable motion blur that spoils the effect.

Nevertheless, the overall effect was quite magical because we could see plenty of structure, and movement going on.

However, I was able to get quite a nice shot of the lights with the ship funnel in the foreground. This was taken from the middle of the ship, so the motion is less obvious.

20th March 2024