The Arctic Light

Sent by freshteam on 23 Dec 2011 / 0 Comment

By: TSO Pho­tog­ra­phy
Info: http://vimeo.com/24456787

This was filmed between 29th April and 10th May 2011 in the Arc­tic, on the arch­i­pel­ago Lofoten in Norway.

My favorite nat­ural phe­nom­e­non is one I do not even know the name of, even after talk­ing to mete­o­rol­o­gists and astro­physi­cists I am none the wiser.What I am talk­ing about I have decided to call The Arc­tic Light and it is a nat­ural phe­nom­e­non occur­ring 2–4 weeks before you can see the Mid­night Sun.

The Sun­set and Sun­rise are con­nected in one mag­nif­i­cent show of color and light last­ing from 8 to 12 hours. The sun is barely going below the hori­zon before com­ing up again. This is the most col­or­ful light that I know, and the main rea­son I have been going up there for the last 4 years, at the exact same time of year, to pho­to­graph. Based on pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence, I knew this was going to be a very dif­fi­cult trip. Hav­ing lost a cou­ple of cam­eras and some other equip­ment up there before, it was cru­cial to bring an extra set of every­thing. I also made sure I had plenty of time in case some­thing went wrong. If you can imag­ine rop­ing down moun­tain cliffs, or jump­ing around on slip­pery rocks cov­ered in sea­weed with 2 tripods, a rail, a con­troller, cam­era, lenses, fil­ters and rig­ging for 4–5 hour long sequences at a time, and then hav­ing to cal­cu­late the rise and fall of the tides in order to cap­ture the essence – it all proved bit of a challenge.

And almost as if planned, the trip would turn out to become very dif­fi­cult indeed. I had numer­ous set­backs includ­ing: air­line lost my lug­gage, strug­gling to swim ashore after falling into the Arc­tic sea: twice, break­ing lenses, fil­ters, tri­pod, com­puter, los­ing the whole dolly rig and con­troller into the sea, and even falling off a rather tall rock and end­ing up in the hos­pi­tal. As much as I wanted to give up, the best way Out is always “Through”. I am glad I stuck it through though because there were some amaz­ing sun­rises wait­ing. At 1:06 you see a sin­gle scene from day to night to day which is from 9pm to 7am. Think about that for a minute.. 10 hours with light like that.

I asked the very tal­ented Marika Takeuchi to specif­i­cally com­pose and
per­form a song for this movie, and what she came up with is absolutely remark­able. Thank you very much Marika!