Last night the sky gave us the most amazing light show. It started very suddenly around midnight when the sky literally started to dance with light.  The lights  twinkled and sparkled and danced above us, in front of us and behind us.  It gives me shivers even thinking about it. It was impossible to capture the majesty of it with a lens because a lens cannot easily take the whole entire sky in one frame. I was shooting at 12 mm and that’s about as wide as most people have.

We started out near a cemetery West of the city and I got these images:

The orange lights are from a hydro plant.

The exciting part of the evening (actually by now it was 2:00 a.m. so it was technically morning!), was when we went to the grain elevator in Meadows. Our driver and chief said on the way to Meadows, that it would make for a perfect picture if a train came through while we were there. Well, Vic got his wish.  We got our train. At the first train whistle I headed over to the gates at the road and set up by the tracks. I wanted to get a shot of the train as it came towards me. (You might want to stop reading now Diane.) I got my shot but OMG, that train went by about 3 feet from me and the wind from the train almost knocked me over. I managed to hold onto my tripod so it didn’t fall down and I stayed in the wind tunnel for almost the whole 30 second exposure but my good sense told me that if I didn’t move the train might just knock me and my camera down. So I moved. I think it was a good thing but it did result in some blur in the image.

Here is the grain elevator before the train.

Here’s the train coming towards me. If you look closely you can see the other people with their tripods in the field.

And here is the train whipping by at an unbelievable speed.

What a night! I got home at 3:00, got to sleep at 3:30 and had a phone call to wake me up at 8:00. (Don’t worry about waking me if you are reading this, I had an 11:00 meeting today.)

It will be hard to beat last night’s excitement. And I didn’t even need to leave the province!!