What focal length to use for northern lights?

Jan 25

Choosing the right focal length for photographing northern lights is often somewhat difficult, if you don't have experience of photographing the auroras.

In this post I gathered some examples of northern lights photos taken with different focal lengths. You can use this as a rough guide of what lens to use in which situation.

All of these photos were shot at different parts of Southern Finland, roughly at 60 degrees latitude.

Fish-eye (<-12mm)

When the auroras are filling the whole sky, fish-eye lens can give you an interesting perspective.

With 180 degree diagonal field of view you can get the northern lights “corona” and the scenery in the same image. Note that the "corona" always appears straight above you.

Ultra wide (14-18mm)

Ultra wide lens gives you an opportunity to include lot of the scenery in to the image without the distortion of a fish-eye lens.

This is my favourite focal lenght range for auroras.

Wide (20-35mm)

The further south you are from the arctic circle, longer focal lengths come more useful. Most of the auroras will stay in the northern skies, unless there's some major solar storm. That also means that you will benefit from a lens with large aperture, because the lights get quite dim when they are hundreds of kilometers away laterally.

Longer focal lengths can also be useful to capture more detailed shots of just the auroras.

35mm is the longest focal length that I use for northern lights. With longer lenses and wide apertures it comes more difficult to get the sky and the foreground in focus at the same time. Of course you can stop down the lens, but then you need longer shutter speeds and it causes smearing of the auroras, especially with longer focal lenghts. ISO is already quite high so that's not a good way to compensate either.

Without any subjects in the foreground, longer lenses are usable though.