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.

Given that this is my first post of this new blog and that it is a new year, I figured I might start out with a look back at my 2011 in pictures.

When 2011 started, Leanne and I were living on Canada’s east coast in the charming city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. I had decided in the fall of 2010 that I should go back to school to study graphic design in order to round off my skills as a multimedia communicator. I enrolled in Applied Communication Arts, a one-year program at Nova Scotia Community College in Dartmouth. It was a wonderful experience in which I was able to learn from experienced and friendly instructors and a nice complement to the photography skills I’d already learned from studying Photojournalism at college previously and having worked as a journalist for nearly five years previous.