There are travel experiences you remember because they were beautiful. Others stick with you because they were completely ridiculous. Then there are the experiences you spend years chasing across multiple countries while Mother Nature repeatedly tells you to go fuck yourself.
For me, that was the Northern Lights.
By the time I arrived in Kirkenes, Norway, this was not some innocent first attempt at seeing the aurora.
Not even close.
I had already tried to photograph the Northern Lights three separate times in Alaska. Failed.
Then I tried four separate times in Iceland. Failed.
That’s seven attempts. Seven nights of checking aurora forecasts. Seven rounds of obsessively refreshing cloud-cover maps. Seven times dragging cameras, tripods, batteries and enough winter clothing to survive the collapse of civilization into the darkness. Seven times staring hopefully into the sky.
And seven times the universe essentially responded:
Fuck you, Sean.
So when I arrived in Kirkenes, I wasn’t optimistic.
I was settling a score.
DESTINATION: Kirkenes, Norway Northern Lights
GPS COORDINATES
70.0226, 30.9269
CLOSEST AIRPORT
CURRENT WEATHER
clear sky (10 C / 50 F)
AIR QUALITY INDEX (AQI)
EIGHTH TIME’S THE FUCKING CHARM
Most people associate seeing the Northern Lights in Norway with Tromsø.
And that’s perfectly reasonable.
Tromsø is beautiful, accessible and packed with hotels, restaurants and enough aurora tour companies to transport approximately half of Instagram into the wilderness every evening.
Kirkenes hits different.
Located at roughly 69.7° north, Kirkenes sits in Norway’s extreme northeast, near the borders with Finland and Russia and comfortably inside the auroral zone.
This is proper Arctic territory.
In winter, daylight becomes more of a limited-time promotional offer than a dependable astronomical event. Snow covers practically everything, temperatures routinely plunge well below freezing and enormous stretches of wilderness surround the town.
Basically, it’s dark, remote and fucking freezing.
Perfect.
And unlike my previous seven attempts, Kirkenes actually delivered.
THE NORTHERN LIGHTS DO NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR VACATION
Here’s the important thing seven previous failures had already beaten into me:
The Northern Lights do not accept reservations.
They don’t care about your itinerary, your flights or the thousands of dollars of camera equipment you dragged through multiple airports specifically to photograph them.
You need solar activity.
You need darkness.
You need reasonably clear skies.
And then you need luck.
Lots of it.
You can obsess over the KP index, solar wind, cloud forecasts and every aurora app known to humanity. You can drive hours into the wilderness, position yourself beneath perfectly clear Arctic skies and still photograph absolutely nothing.
Trust me.
I’ve conducted extensive international research on this subject.
THEN KIRKENES DID SOMETHING DIFFERENT
One night in Kirkenes, a faint band appeared across the sky.
I looked at it suspiciously.
After seven failed attempts, I wasn’t about to get emotionally invested in a cloud.
I’d been hurt before.
I pointed the camera toward it and took a photograph.
Green. Wait. Green?
I checked again.
Definitely green. Holy shit! There it was.
The actual fucking Northern Lights.
What started as a faint glow slowly stretched across the horizon. Another band appeared above it. Then the lights began twisting and rippling through the stars until enormous green curtains were moving across the Arctic sky.
After three attempts in Alaska and four in Iceland, attempt number eight finally delivered.
GET OFFSHORE AND AWAY FROM ALL THE DAMN LIGHTS
There are plenty of ways to chase the Northern Lights around Kirkenes, but I went with an offshore Northern Lights cruise.
And it makes a ridiculous amount of sense.
One of the biggest problems with photographing the aurora is light pollution. Cities glow. Streetlights glow. Hotels glow. Cars appear at precisely the wrong moment and blast headlights directly into the 15-second exposure you’ve been patiently waiting to finish.
The obvious solution?
Leave land.
Northern Lights cruises head away from Kirkenes and out into the dark Arctic waters, putting distance between you and practically every artificial light source humans have unnecessarily attached to the landscape.
As the town disappears behind you, the darkness becomes noticeably more complete. There’s no glowing parking lot beside you, no streetlight illuminating the foreground and considerably less civilization interfering with the sky.
Just a boat.
Black water.
Arctic darkness.
And a bunch of people staring upward wondering whether they paid money for an unforgettable natural spectacle or a freezing nighttime boat ride.
Given my previous seven attempts, I knew which outcome I was expecting.
But there’s another advantage to being offshore: mobility.
Clouds are the great destroyer of Northern Lights plans. The aurora can be putting on the greatest performance of the decade several miles above your head, but if there’s a thick layer of clouds between you and it, congratulations, you’re photographing clouds.
A boat can move.
Conditions aren’t magically perfect offshore, but getting away from localized cloud cover and coastal light pollution gives you options that standing beside a tripod in one fixed location simply doesn’t.
And then, of course, there’s the scenery.
When the aurora finally appeared, there wasn’t a forest, hotel or glowing city underneath it.
There was the dark Arctic sea.
The coastline faded into silhouettes in the distance while green light stretched across an enormous unobstructed sky.
After seven failed attempts on land, apparently my solution was simply to leave the fucking land.
PHOTOGRAPHING THE NORTHERN LIGHTS FROM A MOVING BOAT
Of course, putting a photographer on a boat creates another minor complication.
The boat moves.
Tripods and long exposures work beautifully when the ground beneath them isn’t floating on the Arctic Ocean.
Suddenly, all the usual aurora photography advice needs an asterisk.
You still want a wide aperture. You still want enough ISO sensitivity to capture the aurora. You still want to focus manually and avoid unnecessary light.
But shutter speed becomes even more important.
Long exposures that might work perfectly on solid ground can quickly turn stars into streaks and distant lights into abstract art when the boat rolls beneath you.
The brighter the aurora, the better.
A strong display lets you shorten the exposure, freeze more of the aurora’s movement and reduce the effects of the boat moving underneath the camera.
And then there’s the cold.
Arctic temperatures murder camera batteries with astonishing efficiency, so bring extras and keep them somewhere warm inside your jacket.
For the complete camera setup, photography settings, forecasting tools and everything I’ve learned during this unnecessarily long campaign against the Earth’s magnetosphere, check out my guide to chasing and photographing the Northern Lights.
AND THEN I STOPPED TAKING PICTURES
The thing photographs don’t adequately explain about the Northern Lights is the movement.
I’d seen thousands of aurora photographs before Kirkenes. Green arches, purple curtains, frozen lakes and suspiciously perfect little cabins sitting beneath enormous celestial displays.
But photographs freeze everything into a single frame.
Standing underneath it is completely different.
Especially when you’re standing on a boat surrounded by black Arctic water with practically nothing between you and the horizon.
The lights ripple, stretch and disappear before suddenly reappearing somewhere else. Sometimes they drift slowly across the horizon. Other times enormous curtains twist directly overhead and the entire sky seems to move.
After seven failed attempts, my immediate instinct was obviously to photograph the living shit out of it.
And I did.
But eventually I put the camera down.
Because at some point you realize you’ve traveled across multiple countries trying to witness something extraordinary, and now that it’s finally happening you’re experiencing the entire thing through a three-inch LCD screen.
So I stopped.
For a little while.
I’m still a photographer.
Let’s not get carried away.
THE FUCKING LIGHTS FINALLY SHOWED UP
Three attempts in Alaska.
Four around Reykjavik.
Then Kirkenes.
The lesson from all of this is painfully simple: you don’t get to decide when the Northern Lights happen.
You can study forecasts, obsess over cloud cover, travel thousands of miles and stand outside until your extremities begin filing formal complaints.
The sky can still do absolutely nothing.
Then one night you’re on a boat heading into the darkness off the coast of northern Norway.
The lights of Kirkenes disappear behind you.
The Arctic sea becomes black.
A faint green band appears overhead.
It gets brighter.
It starts moving.
And suddenly enormous curtains of light are twisting across the sky while you’re floating beneath them in the middle of the Arctic darkness.
Your fingers are freezing. Your camera battery is dying. The boat won’t stop fucking moving.
And you’re grinning like an idiot.
Because after seven failed attempts across Alaska and Iceland, Norway finally came through.
Apparently, all I needed to do was travel to the edge of Norway, get on a boat and head out into the Arctic Ocean.
The fucking lights finally showed up.
