From the course: Landscape Photography: Iceland
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Focusing at night
- Photographing the aurora borealis is one of the big attractions for a trip to Iceland in the autumn and winter months. One of the big challenges for this type of night photography however, is focusing the lens so that the landscape and the stars are in focus. Now depending on your ISO, the speed of your lens, how dark the night is, and also how bright the auroras are, the length of your exposure, when photographing auroras, is likely to be anywhere from a few seconds up to 10, 15, or perhaps even 20 seconds. And since auroras do move, it's not the focus on them that's the primary concern, but focus on the stars and the far landscape. Unfortunately, the autofocus systems on most cameras cannot find a focus on a dark night. Now there are exceptions to this. On one of my trips to Iceland, a friend there was shooting at night with a Sony a7S, a camera that is designed for night and low light photography, and it was able to autofocus on the light of a star. Now it was pretty incredible…
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