Aurora Tales
Filming or photographing the aurora can be pretty intense and aurora shooters can get a bit obsessed – I’m speaking from experience. As a result we sometimes miss out on all sorts of amazing things going on around us. I’ve caught myself taking it all far too seriously. I also used to be pretty dismissive of aurora mythology and didn’t pay much attention to stories about cultural legends. As I’ve travelled in Northern Canada, Alaska and the Nordic countries, I’ve grown to appreciate other perspectives on the aurora story. After spending so much time in northern communities and so many hours watching the lights, I’ve seen that there’s more to the aurora experience than science alone can explain.
In northern Norway I met a Saami woman – a dentist – who told me about her childhood fears of aurora. She was scared of the powerful lights in the sky and she would hide when the geomagnetic pulses surrounded her home. She was articulate and compelling, but I thought her story was a bit silly, even superstitious. I thought: who cowers from the northern lights?
Two weeks later an X-class flare hit, the first I’d ever photographed. I raced out to a dark fjord north of Tromsø, and soon bolts of light were shooting all around me. The wind began to howl and gusts blew over my heavy tripod. The blinding light and electric spikes surrounding me were unsettling. I understood how the experience could terrify a child, especially in times when stories about the wildest explosions in the sky reached across generations. Though I know what causes such displays, I was unprepared for my physical response to such intense aurora.