Photographer captures seemingly impossible long exposure action shot of skydivers against the northern lights while flying over 100MPH in sub-zero temperatures

Northern light photography typically involves slow shutter speeds, while sports photography generally warrants a fast shutter speed – naturally, the two genres don't usually mix well. But the final photographs from one skydiver’s mission to jump in all 50 US states were set against Alaska’s northern lights – and the photographers managed to make a seemingly impossible shoot look rather epic.

Red Bull Air Force Athlete Jeff Provenzano had a goal to sky jump in all 50 US states. The last state to cross off the list? Alaska. Red Bull is calling the resulting images from the March 23 jump a "world first" of wingsuiting against the northern lights.

Fellow Red Bull Air Force Athletes Jon Devore, Mike Brewer, and Amy Chemlecki jumped in the wingsuit dive alongside Provenzano. Brewer served as the aerial videographer while Chemlicki coordinated the crew in the air with the crew on the ground. Photographers Michael Clark and Kien Quan, along with videographer Collin Harrington, documented the jump from the ground.

Both the jump itself and capturing the images involved several technical challenges. First, the photographer skydiving, Brewer, would be taking photos while moving up to 120MPH in the dark. Temperatures at the highest altitudes would dip the wind chill to around -40 degrees F (which also happens to be -40 degrees in C too).

On the ground, Clark was faced with the challenge of mixing the slow shutter typically required for low light and astrophotography with action photos.

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The solution? Rear curtain sync, a technique that fires the shot at the end of the exposure rather than the beginning, turns the sky-divers into streaks of light across the sky, giving echoes of the northern lights in the background.

Brewer said that there’s not really an infrastructure in place for photographing skydivers in the dark, as normal free-fall shoots are during the day. “We’re shooting long exposure photography in action sports. You never do that. Normally, you’d be shooting at 1/500th or 1/2000th of a second shutter speed, and here, we're doing a one-second exposure. Trying to hold my head still with a framing that I wasn’t really sure about while going 100MPH was a big challenge, and I didn’t know how it was going to be.”

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Brewer added that the shoot was actually the first time he’s even seen the northern lights. “The first time that I saw them was basically while we were flying wingsuits through them. To see those photos on the back of the screen and realize that we nailed this super complicated, very low probability picture on the first try. That really speaks to the professionalism of this team and everyone’s ability to flex and solve problems.”

It’s not the first time Provenzano has been photographed skydiving through a celestial phenomenon – Clark also captured images of Provenzano against a “ring of fire” solar eclipse in 2023.

Clark said he wasn’t sure if the shoot was even possible. “I love these assignments where we have no idea if we can pull it off, but somehow we seem to always come through on these things…It’s always a blast. There’s always some problem solving…but the images are such a surprise.”

“No one dreamed about wingsuits looking like they’re on fire under the Aurora Borealis,” Clark said. “That was just ice cream on the cheesecake, this is just insane.”

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