Northern Lights over Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan Shores Roadside Park.
My August 15 photo was an easy pick. I was leading a photography workshop in northern Michigan. We were about to wrap up a night time field trip when I saw a little bit of a flicker in the northern sky. Northern Lights! So instead of packing up we stayed out longer.
Our naked eyes could see a faint light in the sky, but not the vivid colors. The Northern Lights display was just too faint. But with the right settings our cameras picked up the vivid colors. This is all due to “Purkinje effectâ€. In low light conditions the eyes lose the ability to detect colors, but the camera can still capture them (link below).
Experienced photographers know there are beautiful colors out there at night that their eyes can’t see and they know how to capture them with their cameras.
I started shouting out camera settings and exposure recommendations to our group. Pretty soon people started shouting “Oh Wow” as the images showed up on their LCDs. For most of the photographers at my workshop this was their first time to successfully capture the Northern Lights.
Some photographers at the other end of the roadside park weren’t having any luck, so we invited them to come down and join us. Turns out they were wedding photographers from Lansing Michigan who were up north to photograph a wedding as a team. But nature photography was not their thing. People in my workshop started telling them what to do to capture the Northern Lights. I was so proud of the workshop participants. Pretty soon our invited guests were getting “oh wow” pictures too. The date was August 15, 2015.
Lake Michigan Shores Roadside Park, a few miles east of Charlevoix, is a great spot to create sunset and night time images.
Photo Data: Canon 5D Mark III. Canon EF 17-40mm lens at 17mm. f/4, 30 sec., ISO 3200.
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