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Believe it or not, we didn't have that much of a winter. Even in Arctic Norway! Since November, 13 consecutive extra-tropical cyclones have brushed the coast of Norway affecting even the coldest places of the country. As a consequence, lots of positive temperatures and rain on top of the snow, somehow destroying the typical arctic wonderland. However in between the lukewarm rainstorms, the cold came back and allowed for short periods of freezing temperatures and snow. In these moments it was important for me to get out there whenever I could and capture all I could get. Cold also meant clearer skies and as a result aurora. Nonetheless it was never as easy as that because of the solar minimum we are at. It means lower auroral activity and fewer big shows. For this film I really wanted to show what few features we had in a different way. That's especially true for the 4 opening scenes where I captured in 'macro-astro' a forest of ephemeral and fragile hoar frost flowers. I am quite proud of the result because it is already quite difficult to do macro during the day because of the closed aperture you have to have (best depth of field). At night, you have to wait for a time near full moon, and expose for 10-15 seconds at high ISOs (and f10-16) if you want to get something in decent focus. Indeed the flowers grew in all direction and where quite big, so to get several in focus in the same frame you HAVE to have a high f-number. In one of the sequences, the aurora even appeared behind! I reduced the f-number to allow for a slightly shorter shutter speed and get a smoother aurora. The next nice shot I am quite content about is the medium-format one where the wind brushes away the snow by the mountain side with the stars of the Big Dipper constellation and the aurora dance behind. Even though we didn't get tons of big northern lights displays this season, you can see that solar minimum still offers tons of opportunity for timelapseable (less active) ones. I hope I was able to convey the soothing and enchanting atmosphere of the winter, even under quite terrible conditions! All was shot with the Sony a7s, a7rII and the Canon 6D astromodified and a variety of bright lenses ranging from 14mm to 500mm. I am also proud (or not ;) ) to say that none of the shots were taken using a slider since it died and I haven't replaced it yet, so all that was used was the panning mode of the Vixen Polarie. All post production was made in Lr with the special timelapse plus plugin, Sequence for mac, TLDF, and final production was made in FCPX. I hope you like the movie as much as I liked shooting in this near-winter environment and processing it and I thank everyone of you for your support. All content is of course copyrighted AMP&F (except sountrack licensed through Epidemic Music), and no footage can be used in any way without the author’s permission. Please contact me for media and purchase inquiry. Please share and comment if you liked the video and follow me for more videos like this one! More at
