We have been leading a number of workshops in Alaska this winter, and had some great northern lights and landscape photography. Shooting in the winter in Alaska generally means you are wearing gloves and probably big mittens as well. Hitting the shutter button becomes a little more involved since it is hard to feel through mittens. The end result is you hit your shutter with a rough touch, and if you are shooting on a tripod at slow speeds under 1/125 you might be getting blurry photos. Punching the shutter in mittens introduces motion and vibration when shooting on a tripod. If you are shooting at 4-15 seconds for aurora, then you will very likely create some blurry shots. You have two choices…you could attach a cable release, which means another piece of gear to mess with, or you could use exposure delay mode.
Exposure delay mode is just that…you set how long in the menu you want the camera to wait to take the photo after you have hit the shutter button. I normally go for one second, enough time for vibration and movement to go away. Take a look at the image above. It was hovering around zero degrees when we were shooting sunrise on Denali. I was wearing mittens and sure enough some of my images were coming out soft on the focus. So I turned on a one second exposure delay, and problem solved. Most DSLR cameras will have an exposure delay setting in the menu. For Z9 photographers, it is located in the custom menu at D6.
Just remember to turn this off for everyday shooting off the tripod! Happy winter shooting!