Photographing the northern lights .....

Why are everybody else's great, and there are some fantastic ones, but mine look like I've tried to take a picture of a dark sky and succeeded.
I have a Sumsung S7 with a decent camera and the settings for camera are the same as my wife's S9. Hers pick up the colours but mine only just show slight colours, mainly a very dark sky.
I'm not going to fanny around with Pro settings or tripods cos nobody else does.
What I seem to see is that lots have something like a house or a light that the camera can focus on and the sky colours still show through.
Since a mobile phone camera can capture northern lights better than we can see them with our eyes does this mean that the lights are of a different spectrum that only a camera can capture and will shine through street or house lights (to an acceptable degree)

 

I saw them in the Arctic circle quite a few years back (though very faint) and took some pics with an iPhone. We had to download some sort of app that applied particular exposure settings on the advice of the people at the place we were staying for it to show... What we did notice was just how much more vivid they were compared to what you saw with the naked eye.

 

It’s an eight year old phone bud - the camera should still pick up the spectrum of colour better than the naked eye but I’m guessing some of the images posted were from much newer and better spec phones.

The ones I posted on the thread last night were taken with an iPhone 15 pro.

 

Did you turn the flash off?

 

Yes.

 

Are they back tonight do we know?

Some great shots in the other thread, BTW. <clapping hands emoji thing>

 

There's a night setting on some phones but not on mine. All i saw was a black screen.but my sons was all.pinks and reds on the.night setting

 

iPhone 14 Plus is mine and it always takes great pictures day or night. Just point and shoot

 

set your phone to night mode and that should do the job i took a few from my back garden last night got some good pics prob better than when i was in reykjavik last year

 

My phone's that old and crap that the picture I took even had the crack across the screen showing.

 

Newer phones will automatically do much of the fannying that you refuse to do

 

Facebook was akin to first day of term photos this morning, a proper snooze fest

 

It's software mate, for example, the picture I posted had an exposure time of about 3 seconds, yet there is no evidence of camera shake - obviously the longer exposure helps to capture more detail in low light conditions. Often there is almost invisible detail in a picture which can be enhanced by software.