Every winter we watch people leave Rovaniemi with a phone full of green smudges and a feeling they can’t quite explain to anyone at home. A print is the closest thing to keeping that feeling. But aurora photos are strange on a wall: some of them glow, some of them just look dark, and the difference is mostly about the photo you pick and the size you print it at.

Joona has photographed the Northern Lights around Rovaniemi and Kittilä for years, and a selection of those nights are available as prints via Printler. This is our honest guide to choosing one — including the ones we’d steer you away from for a particular room.

Why some aurora prints glow and others look dark

An aurora photo has two problems on a wall. First, most of the frame is night sky, and printed night sky is a lot of dark ink. Second, the green is what people remember, but it’s rarely more than a third of the picture. A photo that looked spectacular on a phone at full brightness can turn into a dark rectangle at 50×70 cm.

What fixes it is contrast and a foreground. A lake reflecting the lights doubles the colour. Snow lifts the bottom of the frame. A lit hut or teepee gives the eye somewhere warm to land. That’s why the aurora prints that sell — ours and everyone else’s — almost always have something other than sky in them.

Which photo for which room

Living room, above a sofa. You want calm and width. Autumn Northern Lights is the obvious one: horizontal, soft, with a band of warm dusk that goes with wood and neutral furniture. If your room is darker or has a lot of black and green in it already, Northern Lights Hunting — red and green curtains over a treeline — holds its own.

Bedroom. Go quieter. Star Trail is a thirty-minute exposure of the sky turning over Lapland with no aurora at all — deep blue, restful, almost abstract. The pearl-cloud pair, Polar Stratospheric Clouds and Pearl Clouds in Lapland, look like watercolour and are the least “aurora-poster” of the collection.

Hallway, stairwell or narrow wall. Portrait formats: Northern Lights Teepee, Northern Lights in Kittilä or Autumn Northern Lights II, which looks straight up through the pines.

Office or desk. A 30×40 of the teepee. It’s the one with a story people ask about.

Which size

Printler offers four sizes: 21×30, 30×40, 50×70 and 70×100 cm. Here is the rule we use at home: measure the width of the furniture under the print, and aim for a print that’s roughly two-thirds of that width. A 180 cm sofa wants a 70×100 (landscape) or a 50×70 with generous framing. A 120 cm desk takes a 30×40 comfortably. Go bigger than feels safe — an aurora print that’s too small reads as a postcard, and the whole point is the sky.

If you’re unsure, 50×70 is the size most of our aurora prints have sold in, and it fits a standard frame you can buy anywhere in Europe.

Poster, canvas or framed fine art

Premium poster. 250 gsm pigment print. The cheapest option — from about €25 for the smallest size — and the right one if you have frames already or want to change prints seasonally. Dark skies print well on it.

Framed fine-art print. Hahnemühle paper in a wooden frame (black, white, oak or walnut). This is what we’d choose for the one print that’s the centre of a room. The paper has a soft, matte depth that makes night skies look like night rather than like ink, and it arrives ready to hang.

Canvas. Matte canvas on a wooden stretcher. It’s the most forgiving for a wildlife or landscape photo, but for the aurora we’d skip it — the texture eats the fine detail in the stars and the reflection.

Frames and passepartout

Black frames make the aurora pop and suit modern rooms; oak softens it and suits Nordic and wooden interiors; white works if the wall is dark. A passepartout (the white mount inside the frame) adds breathing space and is worth it for the 30×40 and 50×70 sizes — it makes a mid-size print feel like a gallery piece. For 70×100 we’d go without; the image is big enough.

One honest note: Printler’s coloured frames (blue, red, yellow) are lovely for illustrations and children’s rooms and mostly wrong for an aurora. Stick to wood or black.

Where the light comes from

Dark prints need light on them. Hang an aurora print where a lamp or window lights it from the side, not opposite a window (glass reflections turn a night sky into a mirror). Warm bulbs (2700K) flatter the green; a cool-white LED can make it look grey. If you’re framing behind glass in a bright room, ask Printler for the fine-art option — the matte paper handles reflections far better than a glossy poster.

Frequently asked questions

Are these real Northern Lights photos?
Yes — all photographed by Joona in Finnish Lapland, around Rovaniemi and Kittilä, and edited lightly in Lightroom. No composites, no AI.

How much does a Northern Lights print cost?
Posters start at around €25 for 21×30 cm and rise with size; framed fine-art prints in the large sizes are a good deal more. Printler runs discount campaigns a few times a year, especially in November and December, and the reduced price shows automatically at checkout.

Will the green look the same as on my screen?
Slightly softer — screens are backlit, paper isn’t. That’s exactly why we suggest a foreground and side lighting; the prints on this page were chosen because they hold up on paper.

Can I get a print delivered to the US or UK?
Yes. Printler ships across the EU, the Nordics, the UK and the US, with free returns.

Is a Northern Lights print a good gift?
It’s one of the best for anyone who has been to Lapland or is about to go. Pair a 30×40 with a booked aurora tour — our Lapland gift ideas post has the pairing we’d give.

What if it arrives and it isn’t right?
Printler offers free returns. In our experience it rarely comes to that if you’ve measured the wall first.

Our final pick

If you only take one thing from this: choose the photo with the lake. Autumn Northern Lights, 50×70 cm, framed fine art in oak or black, lit from the side. It’s the print that has found the most homes, and it’s the one we’d put up ourselves. Everything else — the teepee, the red corona over Kittilä, the star trail — is on our prints page with the story of the night it was taken.

And if you haven’t seen the lights yet: come in autumn or late winter, read our guide on photographing them yourself, and hang the print as a promise.