Gabriel Arne Hofstra
@gabrielhofstra
Best of the week 2 at #nomadict 2021
For a long time now, I have been fascinated by the light and the landscapes around me. Whether I was in Northern Norway, on holiday in Greece or elsewhere, my imagination ran wildly. I used to draw a lot of landscapes based on what I saw in real life or imagined in my head. However, I haven’t always been fond of the aurora. Born and raised in Tromso, I have been in a place where the aurora is often seen during dark nights all my life and when I was little, I was scared of the aurora. I remember when I saw the lights in the sky, I thought they would come down and take me, so I would always run home as fast as possible…
"As I got a little older I got more used to the lights, though at moments where the lights were moving madly, I still felt anxious."
"Fast forward a few years, and the aurora has become a profound source of amazement for me."
In 2009 I got my first camera, and so I went out to capture moments and explore the surroundings and landscapes from a different perspective – especially during the night. Though, it wasn’t until 2012 I got to photograph my first aurora as part of a school project. Back then the aurora activity was brilliant in comparison to nowadays, due to solar cycles: 2012 was before the solar maximum of the last solar cycle and the next solar maximum is due for around 2026. Just to explain myself; solar cycles are 11 year cycles where the amount of sunspots on the sun reaches a maximum and minimum.
"Sunspots are key factors for solar storms to hit Earth, and give us some incredible aurora displays!"
The most beautiful one I have ever seen occurred on a full moon night at the end of January 2015. I had been out photographing the aurora for several hours and was about to head home when suddenly the aurora started to appear in ways I never had seen before. It engulfed the night sky with its hypnotic crown shape that moved like fluids. It all topped out with the most vibrant colored aurora I have seen; a great red aurora! This type of aurora is extremely rare and usually appears under extreme geomagnetic conditions. To this date, that night’s aurora show is still the most epic I’ve seen in my life and it changed my photography path to be more of a “patience gives great results” type of photography.
"Although now seeing the lights have become kind of normal, they still surprise me as they always appear in different shapes and intensity."
One night the aurora can only be a faint arch running over the northern sky; the next night it can be like the starry night painting by Van-Gogh, and some nights the aurora can be dancing like crazy all night – even if the aurora forecast didn’t say anything about enhanced geomagnetic conditions or geomagnetic storms! This is why I will never stop being amazed by them, and I will (almost) never lose my patience.
"When it comes to capturing the aurora, patience is the most decisive factor of getting a shot."
Besides that, being prepared with your camera settings, compositions and location, and making sure you don’t get cold. You should always keep in mind that the aurora can be calm the whole evening and suddenly goes wild after “bedtime”. Or the other way around, you never know. So be prepared for nothing, and for everything!
"On the day of the winning shot, the aurora surprised me as well."
The summer prior to the winning photo me and my family drove past an open-pit mining area beside the mountain you see in the photo. I said to my mother that I should come back to this site one day and take some aurora photos. So, the following winter in January that eventually happened. The winning shot was actually a part of a sequence of a few more photos. I had been on a photography mission with a company and we were on our way home, enjoying the views during the ride as the landscape was lit up by the full moon. Suddenly, the aurora started to dance insanely in the sky. We stopped by the daylight open-pit, and I ran the fastest I could up to the top of a 30m steep hill alongside the quarry in deep snow. Arriving on top I hastedly set up my camera to capture the great aurora display, constantly firing new shots as the aurora spinned and danced over the mountain. The shapes of the aurora blended so well with the arctic mountainscape that I felt I had finally achieved one of my photography goals where the aurora danced over an epic landscape!
As I started the post processing later on, the most important thing I wanted to achieve with the edit, or the photo in general, was to demonstrate how strong the aurora can be even under full moon light. I try to achieve the same with my shots of the aurora above an urban environment; usually you see aurora photos with a natural scenery and without any urban elements or light pollution. For me, capturing the lights surrounded just by nature has been a bit difficult as it wasn’t until last year I started to drive more outside the city for my photography.
"I live in the middle of the city here in Tromsø, and despite the light pollution we can see the aurora. And that’s exactly what I want to demonstrate."
My goal with photography is to express what a wonderful world we live in and that something looking like wizardry or magic, like the aurora, is actually physics manifested in observable natural phenomena. It’s an energy of our universe that most of us are unaware of, simply because it can’t be seen everywhere on the planet. Through my photography I hope to somehow enable everyone to observe this magic, wherever they are.
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