If you missed the recent show from the aurora borealis (or northern lights, as they’re known in the northern hemisphere), fear not – we could be on the cusp of a repeat during the week starting June 3. 

Although there are absolutely no guarantees, the part of the sun that caused a G5 geomagnetic storm (the strongest since 2003) last month has returned to face Earth. And the good news is that it’s still active.

According to NASA, the sunspot AR3697 (formerly known as AR3664) let rip an X-class solar flare, rated at X1.4, on May 29. Aurora is caused by the solar wind accelerating down the field lines of our planet’s magnetosphere – which is Earth’s armor against charged particles spewed into space by the sun.

The solar wind and the aurora are caused by what astronomers call coronal mass ejections (CMEs), clouds of charged particles that can be shot into space from the sun in the wake of a solar flare. 

However, when an active region faces Earth, a window of opportunity for aurora opens. The sun rotates every 27 days, so June 6 is exactly one sun cycle since May 10’s display. As luck would have it, that’s the date of the new moon, which means dark skies at night.

This means that, weather permitting, there could be opportunities to see and shoot the northern lights a few days either side of that date. Here’s how to stay up to date on the potential opportunities and prepare to photograph them with a camera or phone…  

5 steps for planning Northern Lights photos

1. Check the conditions

Who do you rely on to tell you that there’s about to be a massive geomagnetic storm? It’s social media – but you have to be so very careful. There’s a lot of misinformation and cult-like social media accounts surrounding the aurora.

If you hear the words “kill shot” or any chat about the weakness of Earth’s magnetic field, run a mile. Rely only on solar physicists and expert aurora hunters who do this as a career and a passion. 

Here are the best websites and X (formerly Twitter) feeds to follow for up-to-the-minute information about incoming space weather: 

The best websites and apps

The best social media accounts to follow

• Dr. Ryan French (@RyanJFrench): British Solar Astrophysicist at the National Solar Observatory and author of The Sun: Beginner’s Guide to Our Local Star.
• Sara Housseal (@SNHWx), Operational Space Wx Forecaster & Meteorologist at Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s Student at Millersville University. 
• Vincent Ledvina (@Vincent_Ledvina): “The Aurora Guy,” a northern lights photographer in Alaska and a Space Physics PhD student at the UAF Geophysical Institute.

A well as a reliable warning about incoming space weather, you’ll also need a clear sky. If there are clouds, it makes no difference how strong the geomagnetic storm is – you’ll see nothing. So consult the best travel and weather apps, such as Windy, for the latest guidance.

2. Find the right location

Although hours of darkness are few at northern latitudes in the northern hemisphere, it’s wise to have somewhere in mind to drive to for midnight just in case a strong display of aurora is forecast. 

A great place to consult before any other is the Find A Dark Place on the DarkSky website, which details all the certified International Dark Sky Places. These are protected land and night skies in 22 countries on six continents, from Arches National Park in Utah and Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania to Aoraki Mackenzie in New Zealand and Elan Valley in mid-Wales.

However, you don’t need to go somewhere with protected sky – anywhere about 40 miles from a city should have a reasonably dark sky. A light pollution map and GoStargazing are both useful for locating pockets of darkness. 

Remember that it doesn’t get dark until about midnight at mid-northern latitudes in June. That will make a difference by narrowing the window of opportunity nightly. For example, the aurora was spotted before midnight on May 10 in the UK. If a powerful geomagnetic storm strikes again this week in early June, it’s going to be after midnight that the aurora becomes visible.

3. Plan your shot

When the aurora appears in the skies above, it’s tempting just to take a shot. Any shot, just to prove you saw it. That’s completely understandable, but it’s not how to take a memorable image of the aurora. Go look at any news articles about the aurora, and you’ll find that most of them include landscapes or people. Or both. 

If you have the luxury of time to think about where you might want to photograph the aurora, try to get something interesting in the foreground – such as the silhouette of a gnarly tree, a building or a lake (for reflections), or crowds of people watching the aurora.

It’s wise to think about the direction of the aurora. Typically, they appear in an oval around the Arctic or Antarctic circles. If a geomagnetic storm is particularly strong, that oval stretches to more southerly latitudes in the northern hemisphere and two more northerly latitudes in the southern hemisphere. 

That means the northern lights are typically seen in the northern sky, and the southern lights are in the southern sky. It’s something to remember when planning a shot – and this is where planning apps like PhotoPills, The Photographer’s Ephemeris and Planit Pro come in handy. However, the fact is that May 10’s geomagnetic storm was so strong that the aurora was visible to the south in the northern parts of the U.K.

Dark skies aren’t everything. Aurora are captured using long exposures of a few seconds or more – depending on their brightness – so it is possible to image them in cities. May’s displays proved that. It’s also true that post-production can be used to remove the unwanted effects of too much sky glare. 

It may be that you actively want to photography the aurora in an unexpected place, such as a city. However, it’s best to keep away from bright light sources, such as street lights, security lights and the always-on office lights of city centers. And that can be hard to do. 

4. Gather your equipment

Yes, you can shoot the northern lights using a smartphone. They’re ideal for making sure that what you can see is, in fact, an aurora and not a cloud. The fabulous reds and greens you see in images from May 10 look far more vibrant to a camera than to the human eye, which sees mostly grey. 

A handheld smartphone will do in a pinch, and it’s useful for checking that Aurora is present. But for a good, memorable shot, you still ideally need a tripod. That applies to both a smartphone and a manual mirrorless or DSLR camera.

For the latter, use a wide-angle lens with as wide an aperture as possible (for example, a 14mm lens and an aperture of around f/2.8). A spare battery or two and a small head torch will also be useful. 

5. Prep the best settings

The best settings for the aurora will depend not only sky conditions but also on what time of night they appear and how bright they are. However, you’re looking at a long exposure of at least a few seconds and maybe as long as 20 seconds. Hence, the tripod.

Set the lens to infinity focus, shoot in raw and use a white balance of about 3500K to 4000K. Benchmark settings to begin your experiments would be ISO 800, a shutter speed of somewhere between 5 and 20 seconds (for a bright-dim aurora), at an aperture of f/2.8. Shoot in raw and post-process to bring out the color, though be wary of making the greens and reds too vibrant. 

For smartphones, ‘night mode’ is the best choice. If you can control the exposure, experiment with a few to 10 seconds. It’s worth considering using one of the best camera apps like Halide or a dedicated astrophotography mode, like the one on Google Pixel phones. 

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Family handout

I’m not aware of a Highland Games prize for the neatest hair bun, but if there were one, this row of contenders would take on all-comers. The picture is included in Robbie Lawrence’s Long Walk Home, a double volume of photographs that are the result of five years of travels in Scotland and Scottish outposts in the US in search of the true tartan spirit of Highland gatherings. “Every event I photographed,” Lawrence writes by way of introduction, “whether on a dusty sports field in Denver, or at the local park in Burntisland, is at its core a coming together of friends and family to enjoy sports, dance and music.”

To begin with, on this quest, Lawrence hoped to strip away the myth-making, to look beneath the kilt of the games, to capture something like their authentic nature. He abandoned that idea, however. Instead, his pictures of grunting caber tossers and spry country dancers, and pipe bands emerging from dreich summer weather, became an attempt “to engage with the myriad of fabricated ideas surrounding the modern Highland Games”, the ways in which those rooted in glens by daily fact or inherited memory find joy in their Scottishness.

The poet John Burnside provides an essay for the second book of Long Walk Home, alongside artful studio portraits of Games legends and hopefuls, lit like Old Masters. Burnside recalls his own version of the West Fife diaspora, relocated in 1965 to Corby New Town, evoking memories of childhood drums and bagpipes “that seemed to rise up out of the earth itself to claim me physically, spiritually… a call to something I did not need to understand”. Scottishness as presented at the Games may well be “as much myth as it is history” Burnside writes, but that only means “we must guard it carefully, retell it beautifully and, more than anything else, love it wisely”.

• Long Walk Home is published at the end of the month by Stanley/Barker (£75 for a double volume)

Local photographer Barrie Fisher took her first photo at 10 years old, after her father gifted her a Kowa camera and some 35mm film. Fisher went outdoors, lined up her family’s dogs and horses, and took the first shot. “It was like all my senses became attuned,” she said, “and I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

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Today, Fisher works out of a large space at 182 Mad River Green in Waitsfield, open by appointment and otherwise limited hours. Her gallery is filled with portraits of families, kids, and pets – some of which she shot herself, while others were brought to her for extensive editing. Much of her work, once edited, has a dreamlike quality. This is especially true for her composite photography, where bits and pieces of original photographs – animals, leaves, and feathers, for example – are layered and combined into a single image. She said that the process of manipulating photos has “taken me to places that aren’t of this earth, and I just love the fantasy of it all.”

Fisher also teaches classes and workshops, photographs wedding and other events, and sells photograph-based souvenirs at the Waitsfield and Stowe farmers markets.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND SKIING

Fischer said that for much of her life, she got to merge the two things she loves – photography and skiing. Her parents founded a ski area called Catamount in Hillsdale, New York, where her family lived, in 1939. Later, they created another called Jiminy Peak in Hancock, Massachusetts. Fisher started skiing at 2 years old, then racing at 5. She got a scholarship to Berkshire School – a private boarding school in Sheffield, Massachusetts, and remembers acting as the school photographer. “The camera was part of me – an extension of me, and I never put it down,” she said.

After graduating high school, Fisher was on the road a lot, photographing World Cup ski races across different countries. She shot black and white slide film, with her photos printed in the publication Ski Racing International – based in Waitsfield at the time.   

She skied while photographing races, “backwards, forwards, whatever I had to do to get the shot,” she said. She would return home to the Berkshires to process her film, or build a darkroom wherever she was on the road. “I would find the chemicals and lock myself in a bathroom,” she recalled. 

She took college classes during that time, studying photography, printmaking, pottery, and other mediums across five different schools in the United States. She said she wasn’t concerned about earning a degree, but wanted to approach her education more playfully, learning about different perspectives on art practice that were coming out of each institution.  

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

In the late 1990s, Fisher transitioned to digital photography. Shortly after, she moved to Warren from Hood River, Oregon, buying a house on the Mad River. That marked her fourth stint of living in The Valley.

About a year and a half ago, Fisher sold her home in Warren, moved in with a friend, and bought her gallery and studio space in Waitsfield. She said that each time she enters the space, she thanks it, and everything in it. Each time she takes a photo, too, she thanks her camera. “It’s so much about that for me,” she said. “It’s the gratitude of getting to do something I really love.”

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Mysuru: Heralding a new era in the world of wedding photography, an AI-powered robot took on the role of photo and videographer, capturing images at a marriage reception with unprecedented precision.
Siddayya Swamy, a BE graduate hailing from Aurad town in Bidar district, and his fiancée Kavya, a resident of Periyapatna, exchanged vows on Saturday. Their special moments were captured by an extraordinary guest – a robot—seamlessly recording every heartfelt moment.
This innovative marvel, weighing between 85 to 90 kg, represents the base version of what could become a staple in wedding photography.
“The photos and videos were captured using advanced facial recognition technology powered by Artificial Intelligence,” explained Siddu, a 28-year-old civil engineering graduate with a passion for photography.
The guests for the event watched in awe as robot deftly navigated the event, overcoming the myriad challenges that human photographers often face during such grand occasions ensuring that every smile, and every joyous celebration was preserved in vivid detail.

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Elton John and his husband David Furnish have collected over 7,000 pieces of fine art photography over the past thirty years.

John and Furnish are some of the biggest collectors of photography in the world. They both have a passion for photography and the impact that a beautiful image can have. John speaks about how seeing fashion photography as fine art changed everything for him. Being a celebrity himself, John has been photographed countless times and never paid attention to photography until he was with a friend at an art exhibition. As his friend was purchasing photos, John started to look at photography as art. John purchased ten photos that night.

One of the featured series in the video is Nan Golden’s “Thanksgiving,” which depicts the AIDS epidemic, drug addiction, and abuse. John recalls his addictions and how he was drawn to this series. John and Furnish also have an AIDS foundation, so the subject matter is important to both of them.

John and Furnish also have several prints from African American photographers who have been very underrepresented until now. As you may know, photographers like Tyler Mitchell and Wardell Milan are making a big mark in photography and the fine art photography world.

Robert Mapplethorpe is John and Furnish’s most collected artist, with over one hundred prints. One Mapplethorpe image is always hanging in each of their homes.

There are so many great images discussed in this video and so many great photographers. The power of a photograph is undeniable, and the importance of capturing a moment in time is how we will remember the significance of that period. As John says, “Nothing speaks the truth like a photograph.”