sara winter's photostream  

Another northern lights image from our trip to Finland past week! At this particular moment the lights grew most intense, exploding all the way over our heads.

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Something to tick off the bucket list: seeing the aurora borealis!

Past few days we've been hanging out in the cold in Finnish Lapland. Main objective: seeing (and shooting obviously) the aurora borealis. And we got lucky on three nights with partially clear to clear skies and at least some activity in the sky :).

It took some time to get confident with the technique of shooting the northern lights. Shooting at ISO 800, F2.8 and manually focusing while it's too dark to see anything through the viewfinder is something I don't do every day obviously :).

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It's still cold in The Netherlands. This morning it was 'only' -16C, rather than the -20C of past Saturday. It did feel colder though, due to a strong wind!

I love the ice sculptures that have formed along the coast of the IJsselmeer (Lake IJssel). They make some interesting foreground objects in my images :).

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Another image from the morning of February 4th. A very memorable morning for many landscape photographers in The Netherlands I think :). With temperatures below -20C, fog, snow, hoar frost and beautiful light it hardly could get any better.

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Shot this morning half an hour before sunrise is quite extreme conditions. Extreme for The Netherlands anyway :).

Only two weeks ago, after yet another week of way too warm and wet weather, no one would've guessed the winter would ever arrive in The Netherlands this year. Now, apparently we have some of the coldest weather in the past 50 years. Last night it was hovering around -20 degrees Celsius. I don't think I've ever experienced such temperatures in the Netherlands myself, for sure have I never gone out to shoot in these conditions.

And how I love it :). Partly 'Nomen est omen' I guess, a good proper winter will always be my favourite season. But with extremes like these it hardly gets better for me.

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