Feeling Down? This Aurora Borealis Video Will Lift Your Spirits
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As a teenager, was there ever a point in your life when you were just sitting around your bedroom — possibly after taking too many doses of cough medicine — and your combination of blacklight, strobe light, ceiling of glow-in-the-dark star constellations, and looping of The Doors Greatest Hits just wasn’t working? You might have thought that taking more medicine would help, but really, all you needed to do was somehow trap the Aurora Borealis inside your room. Piece of cake, right? As an alternative, playing the above video “Wonderlights,” on a projector would work just fine. A time-lapsed series of shots taken by professional cinematographer Enrique Pacheco, it’s one of the most beautiful naturally made videos I’ve ever seen. Here in Louisiana, if you want a light show like this, the best you can hope for is three cop cars’ lights when a drunk driver gets pulled over.
Granted, nearly every video or image of the great Northern Lights is of ridiculously high quality, given the phenomenon is one of the most intriguing and beautiful things we can see from Earth, but these are truly special to me. (Nearly anything time-lapsed gets my appreciation, really.) I absolutely love the shots where the foreground is really crisp-looking houses, rocks, or landscape, while the bright-light insanity dazzles in the sky above. If only GIFs could be turned into art that I could put on my wall.
No newbie to the photography game, Pacheco has made 12 trips to different areas of Iceland to capture the lights in all their glory, and this particular video is a combination of shots taken over the last three years. He used wide-lensed DSLR cameras, with “10 and 20 seconds of exposition” in between the shots.
Pacheco doesn’t want to just horde all this gorgeous photography for himself, though. If you ever find yourself wanting to learn how to make videos like this, perhaps even with different subject matter in mind, you can go to one of Pacheco’s workshops, where he will show you the proper techniques behind night photography and time-lapse photography, as well as what parts of the Icelandic landscape are most suitable for capturing jaw-dropping shots of the Aurora Borealis. Of course, you have to actually travel to Iceland and have all your own equipment, but I know not all of our readers are as rurally based and financially troubled as I am.
Of course, the southern hemisphere has its own brand of beauty in the Aurora Australis, which you can watch in the video below.
