Posted August 30th, 2013

August Aurora

August is not a typical time to be photographing Northern Lights in the Yukon, but the opportunity to do so does arise when the perpetual light of early summer has given way to a few hours of true darkness at night. It was an unusually warm night when I captured this display during the wee hours and it felt rather surreal to be shooting this subject in comfort while wearing light clothing. Though not especially brilliant or colourful, the curtains extended widely towards the southern sky and that enabled me to get this composition with them reflected in the lake. A nice accompaniment to the  March 29th, 2012 Feature Photo  which shows essentially the same scene except with a more typical frozen foreground. I recently purchased the fast, inexpensive but surprisingly good 14mm Bower (Samyang/Rokinon variant) lens with aurora photography especially in mind so I was happy to have this early opportunity to try it out in this application.
Pentax K-5, Bower 14mm f/2.8 ED AS IF UMC, 22 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 800