Shooting the Aurora Borealis on a smartphone

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This is from earlier in the year, here 'shooting the Aurora Borealis on a smartphone' with Stephen Alvarez, but I came across it and thought it worth an extra retrospective LOI. Actually, he missed a trick, in my opinion, since he was shooting in full-res 16MP mode and ignoring the 8MP oversampled mode, with its 'purer' results in low light. Ah well - if I ever meet Stephen for a beer....(!)

Yes, the feature is something of a 'puff-piece', but I still thought it worth linking to. Great results from the Lumia - only a handful were shared on the Windows blog and at low-res on the page, but embedded below are two at higher resolution:

Aurora

Shaman

Impressive results anyway - yes, the Lumia 950/XL has excellent OIS, but for 4s exposures like the aurora one, you need a tripod and camera grip - there's no shame in accepting mechanical help if it's available!

PS. Stephen also mentions shooting the Grand Canyon and the American West on a Lumia 1020 - here's that feature, if you're interested.

PPS. See also some of my own photo features with the Lumia 950 family, pitching it against an iPhone 7 and against the Google Pixel.

Source / Credit: Windows blog