Auro­ra bore­alis over black spruce for­est

Finally—a pho­to­graph of the Auro­ra Bore­alis on borealisimages.ca! (Although, for the record, the title I’ve giv­en these galleries—‘Silvicola bore­alis Images’—is derived from latin roots, and rough­ly trans­lates to ‘inhab­it­ing the north­ern for­est’. The pre­fix ‘sil­vi’ (or ‘sil­va’) relates to the for­est, as in ‘sil­vi­cul­ture’ which is the prac­tice of grow­ing and tend­ing a for­est. ‘Bore­alis’ refers gen­er­al­ly to things north­ern in nature, and is from ‘Bore­as’ — the Greek god of the north wind.)

This is def­i­nite­ly the dark­est pho­to that I’ve ever print­ed, and I’m quite hap­py with the way it turned out—the print lit­er­al­ly felt heavy with ink! On-screen, I could see a lit­tle bit of detail still in the spruce trees, but I can’t see any of that in the print yet. We’ll see if view­ing it in bright day­light will reveal some of those dark­est details, but oth­er­wise I think they look fine as sol­id sil­hou­ettes too.

I took this pho­to in north­ern Alber­ta while doing owl sur­veys this past spring. It was the first time I’d pho­tographed the north­ern lights, and it was a lot of fun to try out a whole bunch of dif­fer­ent tech­niques, equip­ment, and of course, patience… I’ll be doing a round of bat sur­veys in the next lit­tle while, and I hope to get the chance to apply some of what I learned this spring to mak­ing more images of these beau­ti­ful north­ern lights.

(Click to enlarge the image—you should be able to see the stars in the full-size image too!)