Spellbound by Night

I was truly mesmerized when i opened the tent zipper and looked outside as my friend shouted "Ramtin, WAKE UP, they are visible, and very f***** Impressive". I'll never forget this night of my life. We ate early that night and went into our sleeping bags for a nap to wake up and check for the lights. Luckily, on our first night, we saw them.

Photographing the Aurora Borealis at this time of year at such remote locations like this one has its challenges. Long and restless days of hiking or flying is often required to get to Talus Lake. This is near the Arctic circle. Weather here can change dramatically and quickly and even though this was late August, fall colors were already near peak and we woke up to frost at night.

The Aurora Borealis is something that you must experience in person in order to understand what it makes you feel like. There are no words that can explain this feeling and experience. But I'm hoping that my photograph will shed a tiny bit of light on how beautiful and epic this experience is.

For this shot, I used 2 exposures.. One is at night when the light show was at its peak, the other shot is from earlier at twilight-blue hour to bring some details into the shot in the foreground. I love photographing at night because often you can get rid of a lot of distractions in your composition as the landscape transforms under the light. I decided on a vertical composition because I needed to include a lot of the sky and the foreground. With a horizontal one, i'd loose a lot of the river and the sky and instead capture a lot of the mountains on the side which weren't part of the story.
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