Aurora on ice for photographer

I found this on our local website - and really enjoyed it. There is an attached Youtube link (which I know everyone whinges about - but honestly, this one is really great). It's about a local photographer and his work on a timelapse movie in Antartica. I especially liked the view of the cross on Erebus - erected after our worst air disaster, where 257 people perished after hitting Mt Erebus.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/4139037a19715.html
After more than a million photographs and seven Antarctic winters, New Zealand amateur photographer Anthony Powell is about to get serious in his bid to capture the frozen continent.


The satellite communications technician from Taranaki has been photographing the Ice in between his duties at New Zealand's Scott Base and then the neighbouring American base at McMurdo Station.

But this summer he will return to Antarctica as an arts fellow with the United States Antarctic Programme, and his photography will go from being his hobby to being his job.

Powell's time-lapse movies of the Aurora Australis and the range of Antarctic weather, from the 24-hour daylight of summer to the 10 weeks of total darkness in midwinter, has gained him an international reputation, and he now aims to make a film capturing the full experience of the Ice.

" A lot of visitors to Antarctica have commented on how this is the only thing they have seen that truly captures the real feel of what it is like to be down here," he said.

"There have been some really good displays, but it's been an average year for auroras. Some are barely moving.

"They look like curtains hanging in the sky. Others look like sheets blowing gently in the breeze.

"It's taken a lot of trial and error to figure out exactly what works well in the freezing conditions, and I have worn out several cameras in the process (because of the extreme cold)."

Powell first went to Antarctica in 1998. He met his future wife, Christine, in the Scott Base bar, they exchanged vows in the Chapel of the Snows at McMurdo Station in the winter of 2003, and had the reception at Scott Base.

They are wintering at McMurdo Station until October, when Powell will have five weeks in New Zealand before returning to Antarctica to begin his National Science Foundation artists and writers' grant.

 

how did i miss this before?

that is awesome.