antonyspencer's photostream  

I left home at 11pm to get to Northumberland from Dorset in time for sunrise the next day and give myself a sunrise session before meeting all the clients for the weekends wokshop. After driving through a storm all night aquaplaning all over the roads and dodging trucks on their sides due to the severe wind I arrived at Bamburgh and noticed this cloud rolling over and just beginning to glow with the first rays of the morning sun.
As this cloud rolled over the top of this famous castle the colour just exploded, it made all that travelling completely worthwhile, its an amazing experience to witness light like this after putting so much in to get there...

Hasselblad H4D-50 28mm lens 0.3 seconds @ f16. iso 100

One more image from the incredible display of aurora we were fortunate to witness in Sweden a couple of weeks ago.

I think these forests are my favourite part of Arctic Scandinavia in winter, absolutely incredible to photograph.

I wanted to make some time lapse movies here but it was so cold that during a lens change the mirror froze down on my 1dsmkiii. I couldn't move it and I knew that if I got myself and my camera back into the warm car it would thaw out, but that would cause a bigger problem. As the sensor warms it will condensate with the warm air. When one gets the camera out into -35 again you run the risk of loosing the sensor altogether as it freezes up within seconds. Pretty tough going and unforgiving when it gets this cold! All part of the fun and experience though!

The aurora here is the only thing lighting the snow covered landscape, when the aurora dies away it gets very dark indeed and makes balancing the exposures more difficult.

Canon 5dmkii Nikon 14-24 @ 14mm 2.5 seconds @ f2.8 iso 3200

The last Arctic trip was probably the best in terms of consistent evenings filled with aurora and clear skies I have had in many trips over the last few years. This solar storm was the result of a large solar flare on the sun, a flare that actually exploded as we made our way to the airport in the early hours of the morning on the 23rd January.
I was immediately getting excited and planning a location to ensure we got to clear skies to witness this event. We headed straight for the Lofoten Islands only to find the weather was looking too unpredictable so grabbed a few hours sleep before heading straight into Sweden to an incredible frozen forest. Some of the auroral formations and patterns were fantastic here, I spent ages trying to find relationships between the needles and needle type tree tops but this was the best burst I saw all evening for shape and structure.
It was stupendously cold here, the temperature hit -35C but it was worth it for the incredible display, crystal clear skies and the images we managed during the few daylight hours the next day.
Cant wait to do this all again in just two weeks time!

Canon 5dmkii Nikon 14-24 4 seconds @ f2.8 iso 3200.

A new day begins with a beautiful sunrise over Dunstanburgh Castle on the incredible Northumberland Coast.

I am running a workshop up here on the Northumberland Coast with the awesome Doug Chinnery on the 6&7th January and we have a couple of places left now. If any of you are interested please see my profile for a link to my website for more details.

Its an incredible sight to witness when the skies are clear and the levels of geomagnetic activity are strong enough to provide coronal bursts like this. We drove for 7 hours from Tromsø to get here for clear skies and aurora. We we ended up with was a dream of an evening, we had aurora from sunset all the way through until sunrise the next morning and witnessed five huge bursts of activity which all provided coronas like this one.

Canon 5dmkii 24 f1.4Lii 1.6 seconds @ f1.4 iso 1600.