Had my first chance last night to get out and capture the Northern Lights here in Stony Rapids. It was a beautiful clear night and we saw a good burst of colour.

Our staff house here is only footsteps away from the Fond du Lac River, so I made my way down to the river’s edge for the best view of the lights.

The solar forecast is calling for more lights tonight, so I’ll be watching the skies.

This is my first blog post from Saskatchewan!

A week ago today (March 15), Leanne and I boarded a plane in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta and flew off to our new home in Stony Rapids, Saskatchewan. We had been living in Fort Chip for the previous nine-and-a-half months working for the North West Company and were enjoying it there until a few weeks ago we got a call from the company’s HR manager informing us we were going to be transferred to another store in Stony Rapids.

It’s a smaller store, a smaller town, but also an opportunity to gain new experience and further ourselves within the company.

So, with some hesitation, we boarded our chartered Cessna 206 that day a week ago and flew off to a place we’d never been before.

It turned out to be a great day for flying. With only a slight tailwind we had a smooth flight and arrived in Stony Rapids after about an hour and 15 minutes in the air.

After landing, we were picked up by our new store manager, Lynn, and given a brief tour of town – though she herself had only arrived there a few days before us.

The town itself is quite picturesque – well, maybe not so much right now as it’s we’re still in the throes of winter, but in the warmer months float planes land on the river right across from the store and the fishing is supposed to be very good.

While Leanne and I are definitely missing the good friends we made in Fort Chip, we’re also enjoying ourselves so far here in Stony Rapids and looking forward to the future.

Wow, we’ve really been seeing a lot of awesome Northern Lights here recently. Tonight’s show started early – I looked out the door just after 8 p.m. and the sky was already starting to fill up with auroras. By 8:30, things really started to pick up and we (myself, Leanne and her parents who are visiting us this weekend) decided to hit to the road and try to find a better spot for pictures. I’d had the idea ever since we went to Fort McMurray two weekends ago to take some photos from one of the ice crossings just outside of town. By the time we got out to Rivière des Rochers, there was already some brilliant, fast-moving auroras to be seen. I stopped there and took a 30 minute time lapse and a few other shots before we continued on to the Quatre Fourches crossing.

I was hoping to get another 30 mins worth of time lapse, but after about 15 minutes my camera started to act a bit funny because of the cold, so we called it quits and came back home to warm up.

Here’s the time lapse version of what I did manage to get.

The sun decided to give us a Valentine’s Day treat in the form of geomagnetic radiation. The sky over Fort Chip was filled with brilliant and fast-moving auroras which I’m told could be seen from around 9 p.m. until dawn.

Here’s another time lapse I did between 12:15 and 1:15 a.m.

This past weekend, Leanne and I decided to make a trip to Fort McMurray via the winter road – 280 kilometres of groomed ice and snow between here and there.

We loaded up Van Morrison (our 1995 Plymouth Voyager) with various emergency supplies, snacks, topped the tank up with gas, topped our travel mugs with fresh coffee and headed off around 8 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Since I had never driven on this winter road before (and Leanne hadn’t been on it since we lived in Hay River a few years back), we took a pretty cautious approach to our trip down. I must say the road, for what it is, is in great condition. The first part is mostly straight stretches of road over the frozen muskeg (bog) with a few river crossings, afterwards it starts getting more windy and hilly as you drive through the woodlands.

I drove, of course.

After about three hours of this you come out onto a logging road, which then becomes a two-lane paved highway and finally a four-lane freeway once you reach the (in)famous oil sands.

It was my first time seeing the oil sands up close. Without sounding too Greenpeacey, I’ll say this: I have a hard time believing that industrialization of this scale can’t or won’t have a large impact on the region’s ecology. /activism

I have no photos of Fort Mac to share. We were too busy shopping and meeting friends and, also, it’s just not that pretty of a town. At least not at this time of year.

So after our two unrelaxing days we hit the road back home. This time Leanne was actually kind enough to drive halfway on the winter road so I could unwind.

Thought I would have a try at doing a time lapse of the Northern Lights from our front deck while I made supper tonight for Leanne. The following is 120 frames shot over about one hour and 20 minutes.

For the full HD version, click the title of the video to watch it on vimeo.com.

UPDATE 9:58PM: Just reuploaded a higher quality video. Should be working again in about 20 minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience. Works now.

Evenings in Fort Chip are usually fairly low-key for Leanne and I, but every once in a while – like tonight – the skies come alive and treat us to a show.

It was just about 8 p.m. this evening when I saw some friends who live further north had posted on Facebook that the northern lights were out where they were. I stepped out my front door and sure enough they were here too.

After taking a few shots around the house, Leanne and I decided to warm up the van and drive around for a better spot. We ended up Monument Hill, close to the museum. On the hill is a stone cairn marking the spot of the previous Hudson Bay Company fort. Since moving here, I’ve had the idea of using it as an element of interest in a shot of the northern lights.

I took a few shots of the cairn and also had a great view of Lake Athabasca and the islands from up top of the hill so I turned around and grabbed a few shots of that too.

Then the intensity of the lights picked up again and I took a few more frames before heading home to warm up.

As we live in a very remote part of Northern Alberta, it’s very rare for Leanne and I to have visitors. But we were very lucky this weekend as our two good friends, Angela and Bernard, came down on the winter road from Hay River, NWT to stay with us for two nights. Along with them came their adorable 19-month-old son Elwood.

It’s too bad the temperatures were too cold to do any real exploring but, outside of a couple of great dinners and good old ‘catching up’ at home, we did get out to the great local museum and even braved the biting cold to climb up Monument Hill.

It was great to see our old friends again. Luckily for us, they’re also meeting us for our first week in Mexico this May.

February last year was certainly an eventful month. On the 14th, TheBetterHalf® and I hopped on a plane and headed to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic for her sister’s wedding. It was a beautiful (though brutally hot) ceremony for which I was lucky enough to be the photographer.

Quite literally the day I came back to Halifax from the DR, I began work as one of the official photographers for the 2011 Canada Winter Games in Halifax. Since I had missed the first week of events because of the wedding, I had asked the organizers to load up my schedule as much as possible and boy did I get what I asked for!

The only similar event I had covered was the 2008 Arctic Winter Games in Yellowknife, NWT when I worked at The Hub in Hay River, but this event was way bigger and way better in many ways.

My first event was a “pattern skate” for pairs figure skaters. When I first got there, one of the venue media people told me it would be pretty boring since all the pairs had to skate the same pattern on the ice and perform the same tricks. As a photographer, I was happy to hear that since it meant I could pick a spot and know that every pair was going to come by there.

I spent my second day of the games at Ski Martock covering cross-country skiing. What was really cool about these games was that the para-athletic events are included with the main athlete events. The para ski made for some good shots for me.

Curling was a painful sport to cover. Not because I don’t like curling – I do – but because it was six hours worth of kneeling and sitting between the sheets taking photos. I was quite impressed with the action though. I’ve curled quite a bit myself and the skill level of these players (some as young as 15) was really high.

Snowboarding was easily my most successful event of the week. Most of this was because I picked the best spot. Almost all photogs at the hill were shying away from shooting into the sun, expecting to have backlighting issues. I, on the other hand, was happy to because I knew the halfpipe would act like a giant reflector in a sense giving me two light sources to balance the lighting out.

My shot of BC’s Kyle Jasper eclipsing the sun became somewhat of an iconic image for the Games. It was featured on a lot of the post-games reports like this one.

Boxing was the event I was most looking forward to covering at the Games, and in fact the only sport I specifically asked to be assigned to. My only previous experience shooting boxing was an outdoor amateur event held in Ottawa’s Byward Market a few years back. I was lucky enough to get assigned to the finals.

The night didn’t start so well, as due to the overwhelming popularity of the event parking near the Halifax Forum was extremely non-existent so I was forced to park about five blocks away and walk to the arena hauling all my camera gear – in the pouring rain. It took a few rounds for me to dry myself off enough to start taking decent pictures, but all in all it was a great night. It was slated to be the last time boxing would be included in the Canada Games, but I think the crowd was trying to send a message to the organizers that it should stay, because it was LOUD in there. That’s probably the loudest sporting event I’ve ever been to, and I think the boxers fed off of the crowd’s energy.

My last event was the women’s hockey final, which was also a lot of fun.

What a great couple of weeks.

First of all, I need to wish happy birthday to my sweetheart Leanne, who turns 30is another year older today.

Today more than any other thus far this winter has me thinking of our trip to Mexico this May. I woke up to a temperature of -35 degrees (C) outside and a wind chill approaching -45. That is cold in any language I think.

Thankfully the van was kind enough to start for me today. It would have been a cold walk to work.

I just got a knock on the door as I was writing this. It was a friend’s brother who promised to give us a whitefish from his freezer. Little things like this remind me why it is I live in the north.