I am so pleased to share that my image Brushstroke is the Aurorae Winner of Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023. The competition put on by the Royal Museums Greenwich is the world’s largest space photography competition and one of the few competitions that I enter (if I remember – one time I paid the fee then forgot about submitting images before the deadline!). In its 15th year, there were many entries from all over the world in numerous categories. It is such an honour to have an image that I love and is a unique northern light capture to win in such a prestigious contest.
Shortly after I found out that I was shortlisted in April 2023, the museum reached out to ask if I would be willing to film a documentary with them. They wanted to feature me, my shortlisted image Brushstroke, and acknowledged the need for more diversity in astrophotography. The film and article put together by the museum can be found on their Behind the Lens page.
In this blog, I wanted to go further into how Brushstroke was created and what was happening the night we were chasing the northern lights. Brushstroke was taken in Utsjoki, Finland, right outside of Aurora Holidays where Rayann Elzein and I host a photography workshop. Utsjoki is one of the best places in the world to catch aurora. Utsjoki is the northernmost municipality in Finland, with Norway just across the Teno river which flows into the Arctic Sea. The northern position of Utsjoki makes it ideal for seeing Northern Lights any night – as long as the skies are clear, of course!
I have seen northern lights every night I have spent in Utsjoki when the skies were clear. In central or southern Alberta, I would generally need a geomagnetic storm with a value of KP4 (moderate activity) to capture something interesting. In Utsjoki, KP1 will have lights dancing through the sky. On the night Brushstroke was taken, we had a KP5 event. Usually, you see the northern lights in the north portion of the sky. On that night, the lights danced all around us.
We chased the northern lights for many hours on January 7th, 2022. By 2 am on January 8th, most people had gone to bed, but Rayann and I stayed out shooting, along with one die-hard workshop participant. Quite often, we were pointing our cameras south. The formation that made me start looking for the composition and shape that would be Brushstroke began in the southwest. My first images were in landscape orientation. As I watched what was happening int he sky, I flipped my camera to portrait orientation since the structure was tall.
After flipping to vertical.
Tilting the camera up to experiment with cutting off the foreground and capturing shapes.
I noticed the clouds were mimicking some of the aurora waves and tilted the camera back downwards.
You can almost see the Brushstroke shape in this moment. 3 minutes after the previous frame with the wavy clouds.
The shape was constantly changing.
I was almost losing interest with it at this point and was going to turn to shoot in a different direction.
Then it happened! With my camera tipped upwards again, I captured a beautiful shape in the dancing vertical formation. At 14mm, the shape filled the whole frame with the Pleiades at the bottom with the feathered section. I took many abstracts that night, but none had the solitary definition that Brushstroke did. From coronas to swirls and converging streaks, nothing came close to Brushstroke.
An aurora corona is the central point where a large geomagnetic storm hits the atmosphere.
Aurora making a V shape with many lines converging.
A tall curving shape surrounded by soft green streaks of light.
The Northern Lights are always different every time I see them, and they move through a dance, never staying very still (unless you are at a very southern latitude, looking at an arc of green low on the horizon). Each moment is fleeting – remember to enjoy it with your eyes as well, not just with your camera.
If you’d like to join me for a photography workshop in the best place to catch northern lights, check out our March 2024 edition of Spring Light in Lapland! We’d love to show the beautiful arctic landscape, take you to visit Reindeer and Puffins, teach you about Sami culture, and of course take you chasing aurora as much as possible.
