Never been a more important time to reflect on our good fortune. The lovely people who make our community what it is. The cultures and nature that have brought beauty to our own lives.
All the better when armed with a camera. The photos themselves perhaps matter less than the task of enjoying our time to take them.
Imagine living in a place like this for most of your life and just thinking it's normal to be surrounded by such a beautiful landscape?
The little white dots in the water are Kittiwakes, who are just starting to terrorise the locals by nesting on cliffs and chatting loudly aaaaaaaaaall through the night.
Pretty good day today. Won't see these lovely mountains again until the the year end. That makes me sad, but I must remember how lucky I am to have spent some quality time here
Have enjoyed escaping from reality for just a little bit, and connecting with a different kind of reality.
#EwenInNorway #Photography #LumixS1RII #HappyPlaces #LukcyToBeHere #Lumix
Helping a friend with a shoot this week, having scored a little blue sky. Headed into this fjord to do some fishing, and got some nice scenery as well.
We've had about 40cm of snow in the few days since this shot. Would love to pop back and see what this scene looks like today.
Sun. Ice. Halo. Birch. This went for hours today. I now have 16 bazillion photos that all look like this.
The joy of the unexpected.
Yesterday was by any measure a totally shit day for me. Except for one brief break in the clouds. Metaphorical and literal.
I stepped outside at twilight to watch another aurora, and over the next hour the cloud cover thinned. And it was a marvellous show. I decided to grab a camera and start a timelapse in case more nordlys arrived... and I got lucky
One of the best auroras I've ever seen.
Here's a treat for being good this week, a timelapse of the forest last night in Arctic Norway.
There's a very very big mountain to the south of this creek that holds back the clouds. We constantly get long patches of clear sky even when the entire region is clouded over. And sometimes the aurora activity kicks up at the same time. That's a win.
New on the blog: Auroras Don't Come Easy
"Part of the charm of the Northern Lights is the very fact that they are not easy to capture. Hard enough to plan your travels to be at the right place at the right time, and even then you're often at the limits of your camera gear and your clothing."
I made a 60s video for my aurora trip next January, featuring a bunch of aurora timelapses from this January :)
Can watch that on my Vimeo page, or there's a copy on the tour page as well.
This morning we had a hint of light getting underneath the snow clouds. Enough to make us smile.
I'm using a 60-600mm telephoto by Sigma for this scene. It's a big lens that I usually don't make an effort to take off the shelf. This winter I've really loved having it with me for chasing birds and snow capped peaks.
Ended up with more clear skies tonight, despite the forecast. Was testing out the S&Q video mode on the new camera today and it happened to be rolling when the aurora spiked in the early evening.
I love a little moonlight with aurora photography, even a full moon.
Here's a lowres version so I don't fill up the hard drive space on our mastodon instance :)
Was a bit slow of the mark to notice we had clear skies tonight, and when I stepped outside to check the nordlys were already dancing.
Was a lovely show. The moon is super full tonight and lighting up everything. Hence the intense colours. Regardless, this moment of aurora was good enough to compete with the street light just behind the house :)
The snow came home today!
OMG the change in mood to look out the windows and see a foot of fluffy white stuff in every direction.
Some folks get sad in winter from a lack of sunlight. I get sad from a lack of snow. Climate Change is wrecking the party in Arctic Norway, and we've had weeks of rain instead of snow. But today is a good day. Today is lovely.
Flashback to a couple of weeks ago, our first night arriving into Senja. Had a lot of aurora activity through the night, and a beautiful location to enjoy the photography.
Today it's still 5°C outside and rainy, and most of the snow is long gone. These heat bubbles in the Arctic look like a permanent feature of winter now. That makes life much harder for chasing auroras in the night.
I wish more people could see the beauty in our world. The things that make this planet remarkable. The little details. The grandeur of its complexity. The harmony of nature. The preciousness of our very existence.
I wish every human on the planet could experience the beauty I've seen, and not just from the photos.
