Dawn of the North
Shortly after the borders reopened to Canada last summer, I packed my bags and drove 1640 kilometers from Tulsa, OK to Winnipeg, MB. I had looked forward to the trip because it allowed me to reunite with family and celebrate finishing my senior capstone and graduating from college.
Growing up in Manitoba, I was exposed to the natural wonder of the Aurora Borealis for much of the year. As a little child, I peeked out the window during the cooler months in hopes that I would catch a glimpse of the dancing aurora over my childhood home. In 2010, when I purchased my first kit camera, I was able to photograph the aurora for the very first time even though I had no tripod or any idea of how to use bulb mode. I remember those days of experimentation before I learned the technique of long exposures and tripods. Somehow, through trial and error, I made it work. Looking back at it now, I realize it was then that I began to discover my love for photography.
I remembered this initial photography moment while I was back home last summer, and I knew that it was a shot that I wanted to revisit. Thus, I began planning to have a second go, but this time, I'd do it as a professional photographer. I devoted numerous hours studying everything that I could to better understand the light phenomenon. This encompassed when to decide to shoot, location planning, and how to read the weather data. After all of that, all I had to do was wait for a decent coronal mass ejection headed towards Earth. Then, all were systems go. I connected with some local photographers that helped me navigate the weather data that was ideal to get the shot that I was looking for.
On August 30th, it happened! I was just about to go to bed when I got a notification from Space Weather Live that a threshold of KP4 had been reached. The data looked promising, and I was running out of days before I had to make a return trip home to Tulsa, so I knew that I had to try.
Looking back on it, I wouldn’t trade nights like this one for anything. I somehow convinced my dad to come along on one of my night shoots. We drove 45 minutes from our home to Lake Winnipeg in hopes of seeing the northern lights. It was a phenomenal night for KP4 aurora. I immediately set up my camera in the sand bar and photographed the dancing aurora for two hours. Shortly after midnight, the moon began to rise, and it drowned out the aurora. I then set my sights on the iconic piers at Matlock. They are hand-made, perched high above the water, and they stretch out into a vast inland sea of Lake Winnipeg. This was the last image that I photographed before closing out a successful adventure with dad. Enjoy the results!
I have to give a huge thank you to local photographers Shannon Bileski, Kim Hines, Ryan Lucenkiw, and Justin Anderson for all of the help and encouragement they gave me as I sought to photograph the aurora. I’ve linked their pages below.
Shannon Bileski
https://signatureexposures.zenfolio.com
Kim Hines
https://www.instagram.com/kimhinessupernature/?hl=en
https://www.facebook.com/supernaturemusic/
Ryan Lucenkiw
Justin Anderson
All users are prohibited from copying or downloading content. ⓒIvisonphoto