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Iceland V: Lights for real

In a perfect world, I would have spent some time before our trip learning how to photograph the stars.

In reality, life is busy: we tend to oscillate between travelling a lot, having guests, and being sick. And the city we live in doesn’t come with stars included.

So the photos are a bit blurry.

But still, I would argue… really. friggin. magical

We were in Iceland in a period of ridiculously high solar activity, which meant that we got to saw the lights on multiple evenings, and got a technicoloured range of displays throughout the evenings.

Even so, I have to point out that what you see in the photos isn’t quite what you see to the naked eye.

To the eye, it’s a bit more cloud-like, or smoke-like, with less intense colours. Sameer was pretty good at making out the greens and reds, but to a slightly-colour-blind me, it felt more like a combination of guesswork and instinct rather than true vision.

The true colours shined better when viewed through a camera or phone.

But even of you’re not so good at colours, the Lights are recognisable for their scale, and the way they move.

And they seem to exist to highlight the fact that the sky above us does in fact not exist in the two dimensions, but comes with a vertical plane:

Watching them brought back memories of reading the ‘Northern Lights’ trilogy as a child.

And the lights (as well as being in Iceland generally), made me feel certain that Medievil Me would have believed in some sort of Gods with near-unwavering conviction.

Look at those shapes! look at those curvey curtains!

Because the light hung around for a while that second night, we spent some time playing around with poses.

The main downside being that it was incredibly cold, and difficult to check the photos properly without running back to the cabin and uploading them.

(^In case the artistic vision is not 100% clear, I’m imagining myself as a kind of Mickey Mouse Sorcerer in Fantasia in this one).

We also followed the example of some of our tour group, and started playing around with lighting up our faces with the phone light.

Sameer, for reasons that are best known to himself, choose to do this *cough* sword *cough* motion with the light:

And then, we just spent some time trying to long-exposure those lights.

In all their shifting patterns:

One of the group members had some more experience with photography, and with the lights in particular, and had been on a couple of separate missions to capture them. So maybe, future Tegan can also hone here skills and work out how to make everything look a little less blurry.

But for now, I’m ok with taking blurry, if it comes with a side of magic.

GHOST TEGAN:

October 6th, 2024

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