the evenings out here - Thoughts, rants and musings about absolutely everything except photography. Or cats.

Seen the light

Arctic adventures

in Photography , Monday, January 06, 2014

Finally, after many failed attempts, I have finally been able to experience and (sort of) photograph the Aurora Borealis.  This time, rather than Iceland, we travelled to Tromsø, with at nearly S70 is in an ideal location, is quite easy to get to, and frankly is a little less encumbered with the “wow, aren’t we amazing hardy unemotional nordic folk” vibe which can get a little tiresome in Iceland.

On Jan 1st we really struck oil, arriving in town just in time to witness a full blown spectacular show. The next day we got a reasonable display out in the Lyngen Alps, on a snowmobile trip. Not perfect for photography but good fun.  The third day, planned for a more photo-orientated experience, was pretty much a dead loss, so we ended throwing in a fourth attempt on a pack-em-in coach tour, and actually that was not so bad.  It was notable that the 50-seater coach followed almost exactly the same itinerary as the previous evening’s “expert Aurora hunter” trip which was billed as going were the major tours can’t get to.  Whatever.

No earth-shattering photography, but that wasn’t the point, it was more of a short, fun, holiday.  Here are some quick edits of what I did grab.

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Posted in Photography on Monday, January 06, 2014 at 03:52 PM • Permalink • Comments (2)

2 comments

Project Hyakumeizan January 06, 2014 - 8:36
Many thanks for posting - the second picture down is particularly extraordinary. There are thousands of aurora pictures out there on the web, but few or none like this one. Might a bit of extra contrast help to bring out the unusual structures?

2 comments

David Mantripp January 06, 2014 - 9:46
Unfortunately that second one is not correctly focussed, and no amount of photoshoppery can fix that. Pity really, the composition is actually not bad, and was actually deliberate, but I was somewhat distracted by my Significant Other's Fuji X-S1 Wondercam once again picking the perfect moment to throw a tantrum and scream that had a LENS CONTROL ERROR and wasn't going to take any photos. So what with trying to deal with that, setting up my own camera in the dark, and the fact that these effects are very epheremeral, I'm lucky I got a shot at all. At least the Russians in our snowmobile group, with all the gear, no idea, but very bright headtorches were looking in completely the wrong direction. They waited until the next location to screw things up......