Personal Side-Projects @ Kilpisjärvi
posted by lupo on 26 December 2013

Besides working on data_opera and the search for natural random-sources I spent some hours, mainly at night time on my amateurish approach to analogue photography. I focussed on long-time exposures to catch photons of the big ghost fo the area, the Aurora Borealis. Well equipped with two analogue cameras, a Nicon F and a Hasselblad 500, some color slide films for the Hasselblad and color negative and one color slidefilm for the Nikon and a heavy tripod which could be mounted in the deep snow. So I went out after whenever the Aurora forecast and the activity monitors and Information from Derek McKay-Bukowski Master of Kaira Station indicated reasonable chance of ghostly appearances with both cams and I took the 35mm cam whenever explorations of the environment had been sheduled. Or I rushed to get a cam, whenever light or aurora activity forced me to to so, e.g once deeply relaxed after a sauna evening, as I got stunned by a really incredible active Aurora burst, of course yet not equipped with a cam, so I rushed in within the moment the burst started to calm grabed the cam yet stored in minimal reach from the entrance door, but too late to get a shot with these dancing swirls of green and purple. So in addition to the two good middle-format shots and some nice small format shots of Aurora I had been tought the lesson about the moment, the pictures in the head and the somewhat flat representations on the images. Further I start to realize, that I have to get some pictures which are analogue because the digital scans break the medium, while they make it easy to share the frozen and condensed moments, of which I only witnessed some parts, as some shots are real longtime exposures done at temperatures most of the time below -15°C or even lower.   More pictures here: