nature's light show

"no sky leila had seen before could compare to the beauty she was

seeing above her. it didn't feel like some accident of nature but rather

something that was purposefully unleashed on the world."

-adi alsaid, let's get lost

ready for a brief lesson in eye vs. camera dynamics?

our eyes are different from a camera sensor in many ways. i’m just going to touch on one here - night time photography.

camera sensor are simply better at capturing color and details in many night time situations. our eyes are less sensitive to color in low light. a camera sensor, on the other hand, maintains the same sensitivity at all times. so it records color and intensity of color that we might not remember or only see faintly.

our eyes at night remain static in terms of picking out details; that just means something does not become more detailed or easier to see the longer we look at it. camera sensors have a huge advantage in that the longer the sensor is exposed, the more detail it can record. what we might see faintly in the sky is brought out in much more detail with a longer exposure.

makes sense? i give an a+ to all of you who have made it this far!! now…on to why i shared that…

i had driven to one of my favorite locations based on the rumors of a massive northern lights show not only pending, but already happening. it just wasn’t visible yet where i was as it was still light out. i  pulled into the abandoned farmstead. i have shared quite a few images from this location. but nothing of the likes that was to come that night. in fact, I have never shared from any location where i’ve made images what you will be seeing in this blog. i’ve never seen such an intense northern lights show. this one registered about as high as it can go.

i stepped out of the car and just walked around a little bit. this location is an oasis for me; it’s an old “friend” as far as landscapes go. it’s not the only one but it’s high up my list. it is a place where i can unwind from the stress of the world. unless i bring a friend, to this point at least, i’m always the only one there which is kind of amazing as it is right off the road and easily visible. i thought that maybe tonight, with the northern lights potential, there might be other photographers there. nope! only me, myself and i. and i wasn’t complaining one iota.

i explored the property briefly, reacquainting and reintroducing myself since the property was a friend i hadn’t visited for awhile. i had my iphone with me and used that to create some images as i made my rounds. Here are some of my more favorite ones I created with my iphone.

eventually, i walked back to the car and grabbed my trusty camera gear that has been on many adventures with me. i may be getting older and i may feel more aches after a night of photography; such is what happens when i’m standing, kneeling, laying on the ground, climbing over and around things and more. but it never gets old. it’s as exhilarating as it was the first time! do you have something in your life that moves you like that? i’m so grateful i do. i hope you do too.

after exploring the property again, this time with my fuji camera, i did something i have never done before at this location. a friend that previously came with me to this location said he saw a piano inside though he did not step into the house. i remembered that and decided to check it out. after assessing and deciding this particular section of the roof above the house would not fall on top of me, i walked through the waist high field of grasses and shrubs that love to leave their sticky “stick-ums” on clothing. once i arrived in front of the house, i squeezed between a partially open door and the door frame and stepped inside.

there, i found a small amount of odds and ends littered inside what potentially looked to be some sort of small family/living room in its heyday. almost all the way to the right wall, there it stood! an upright piano! in the extremely low light of the day, the piano looked faded in years with layers of dust. being one who has played the piano extensively in days past, i’m surprised i didn’t try to “tickle the ivories”. it just never occurred to me to do so to see what it sounded like. maybe unconsciously i felt this “abandoned hallowed space” was better left to quietly observe. who knows….at any rate, i wouldn’t have heard too much with the tones as my hearing drops off rapidly when hitting the keys more than four notes on either side of middle c.

i spent a little time trying out different compositions using both my iphone and my fuji camera. the iphone did not render the image very clearly in the dim night of the fading day; it was very noisy (grainy). i finally pulled out my lume cubes to try different lighting angles while shooting with my fuji camera. i shared one image on facebook a while back and asked if people could identity what is was. here is that image again.

as many of you who follow me know, i’m a big proponent of mood and mystery when it’s appropriate. my favorite images of the piano i created are not the full inclusion of the piano but rather the play of light and shadow on the piano. by now it was a dark dusk outside and the lume cubes were the only source of light inside the abandoned home. these two, along with the one shared above, are my favorite of the bunch.

i grabbed my gear, maneuvered carefully around the scattered objects on the floor using the light of one of my lume cubes and squeezed my body back out between the door and door frame. once out, i walked back through the waist high grasses and shrubs to the clearing of what once was the main entry road/driveway through the property when people lived there. once there, i looked up to the sky. ever so faintly, i was starting to see a sort of ghostly motion happening in the sky. I attached my camera to the tripod and made an image. yeah!! the lights were finally becoming visible! this image is the very first image that captured the northern lights that night. it is nothing compared to what you are going to see!

truth be told, to my naked eye, i don’t remember what i saw of the northern lights. chalk it up to it being a couple of months later…or not paying attention and remembering to look more intentionally with my eyes and not the camera…whatever the reason, i don’t remember seeing colors with my eyes. i do remember seeing a sort of ghostly white movement in the sky but that’s about it. on the flip side, i’ve read post after post of people saying that it was so strong they could make out the colors with their eyes! my wife and her friend were one of the many who said so.

it’s hard to describe what i was seeing through my camera lens and sensor. the best i can come up with at the moment is that a translucent curtain was unfurled and vivid colors were shining through the curtain at my location on a rural farmstead! sometimes in straight beams; sometimes in curvy waves! it was of mythical proportions in my mind!

mind you, i’ve never been to the general arctic circle region where northern lights of that intensity and magnificence happen fairly often. a show of kp 8/9 here in minnesota ( a value from 1 to 9+ is used to rank intensity of the northern lights; this is a very simplistic explanation) would be akin to a kp 1/2/3 rating in iceland for instance (i’m being very general here; if you are a northern lights expert, please give me latitude if i’m not entirely correct. i’m no expert 😉).

i spent the rest of my time on this farmstead creating images. i wasn’t running around trying to create images from all angles and locations; for me, that results in lots of images but mostly mediocre images. i was intent in maximizing my time as northern lights of this intensity are extremely rare in my part of the world. i wanted to be intentional in creating images and efficient in creating as many of them as i could. often times i stayed in the same spot for a while. the ever changing patterns, colors and intensity literally would differ from image to image even in the exact same spot!

this location is not one where walking around would lead to as many different experiences or discoveries one might encounter on longer hikes. this location was the whole adventure in and of itself. as such, i’m going stop writing and let the images do the speaking to you. it is my hope that through the images i created, you will vicariously get a sense of what i experienced that night in person; awe, wonderment, excitement and just overwhelmed at what was happening before me! these images are in order of when they were created. be sure to click on the image to bring up larger in a separate window. you will be able to scroll through all the images in that window.

this image is looking straight up into sky where it appeared to be the center of where the lights were coming down from (toward the top left corner). I don't know that there is such a "center". i did a brief search and didn't find anything. but is sure looks like it!

this barn image shows up quite well as a vehicle's headlights shone across the field and up the foundation and barn. if you remember what i wrote earlier, this location is right off a county road. there is nothing to obstruct vehicle headlights.

even though the northern lights continued to unfurl its colors in an extravagant manner, i began to wrap up my time at the farmstead. I packed up my gear and got into my car. as i pulled out of the entry onto the county road, i drove off, eyes peeled for deer as they are prevalent in this region. but i was not done! i began to head to another location, another farm, this one inhabited by some friends just outside of st. croix falls. hopefully, this location would find the northern lights just as alluring!

and that is a story for next time! it feels good to have another blog in the books as it has been a while since my last one. i had written shortly after my last one that my work schedule was changed; i most likely would not be writing blogs at the same consistency anymore. i certainly didn’t think it would be this long!

i hope you enjoyed the blog and images! share any comments or questions you may have about the blog and/or the images. i enjoy reading and responding to them!

all images are available for purchase if there is one or more that you are interested in purchasing. shoot me the details of your interest via one of the contact avenues depending on where you are reading this blog. i’ll get back to you and help you put together a photographic art piece that will provide you years of visual pleasure! here are a few examples of how they might look in your home and/or business. these examples will help you get a feel for the scale of print sizes relative to your wall space.

"aurora over the barn" - 32"x48" metal print

piano mood 1 - 48"x 32" framed and matted print

views from the barn 1 and 2 - 18"x24" framed and matted prints

thanks for your continued support of my blogs. i would love to get them out to more people and you, as the reader, are the best way to help me do that. if you enjoyed it, you can be sure others will as well. please share via email and social media. depending on where you are reading the blog, there are various options such as copying/pasting the url or utilizing the share button. a big thanks in advance for those of you who do pass on my blogs for others to read!

i’ll be looking forward to sharing my next blog with you all down the road, complete with more “images from my quiet world”!