Photographer Gareth Hutton advises getting to know your camera before travelling

“Modern cameras make it much easier for people to take incredible pictures, and this is also the first solar maximum where digital cameras have been the dominant type of camera,” says Gareth Hutton, a New Zealand native who got hooked on the aurora after his Finnish wife dragged him into the Arctic wilderness with a camera in tow.

Photographing the Northern Lights isn’t too difficult, he says. “The biggest mistake most people make is that they don’t know their cameras well enough to quickly change settings in the dark. I would advise anyone heading up here that they switch off the lights at home and spend a bit of time in darkness practising changing the shutter speed, the aperture and the ISO until it’s second nature, because when the aurora comes you don’t have time to hang around.”

Most visitors to the Arctic Circle are happy enough to get a few photos to post on social media, but experienced photographers are pioneering new ways of capturing aurorae. “The trends are set by those living in aurora regions who have the opportunity to shoot every night,” says Hutton. “Timelapse was the first logical progression, and with the increased ISO capabilities of cameras today it’s only natural that real-time video will follow.”

Most of the real-time videos of the Northern Lights that are starting to appear on social media streams are from local photographers and videographers using high-end DSLRs with ISOs as high as 25600. For those of us without top-end kit, there is one trend that’s much more accessible: the Northern Lights selfie!