Late on Friday, May 10th, my wife and I were driving home and spotted a little aurora peaking through the clouds. We had heard whispers that there was a chance for nice northern lights but didn't have our hopes up with pretty intense cloud cover most of the evening. However, as we watched just after midnight from the side of our favorite dirt road, the clouds seemed to melt away. Within minutes, the little glimpse of aurora we saw on the horizon was stretching across the sky.
After running home to grab my camera and throw on some warmer clothes, we headed out a few miles west to a spot that I'd been keeping in the back of my mind for a few months for a night like this. It had uninterrupted views to the North along with an abandoned structure that could make a cool subject. As we drove, it became clear that there would be no need for views to the North. The entire sky was shrouded in dancing pillars of light, each swaying and shifting almost outside of time.
Every direction I looked, there was a completely different facet of the aurora. Each moment was both wholly unique and almost paradoxically, a preparatory act for the next step of the dance. The aurora boggles my mind - something so beautiful that is constantly changing. Never existing in a single state, it is both an act of exultation and an act of letting go. It's rebellious in this way, I think. Our world seizes whatever is good, whatever is beautiful, and holds on as tight as can be. It grasps in order to continue the incessant practice of consuming beauty, rather than what beauty was made for: to be loved. The northern lights don't stick around long enough to be seized, instead they simply exist, exult, and then become something new.
Sure, I can take a photo - which might be an act of grasping at what was. But in the moments the lights danced above me, I was experiencing the lack and inability to capture what was occurring. All I could do was to love them, to be in awe of them and the world I am a part of.
After the fact, we learned that there hadn't been a solar storm rated so strongly in decades. Where we live in Alberta, it doesn't take a strong storm to have aurora, however, I was seeing photos from friends and family in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon who had all shared in the same experience as we did. That in itself was profound - how often do you experience the same weather phenomenon as people thousands of miles away!
This final photo was the one that I was most excited to try and capture. I mentioned that I had been keeping this location in the back of my mind, particularly for an old structure present on the land. Each time I drove by, I imagined an image like this. I thought it would be an awesome foreground amidst a stunning night sky, making the results even more satisfying to me.
All of the photos were shot on a Fujifilm GFX 50R and Nikkor-N.C Auto 24mm f/2.8 Non-AI.
