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2.79 - "Solid" 

I am not sure, if it perfectly matches the category "travel" - for me personally it does, since I photographed the exact reason for our travel: The Northern Lights!
For this, we traveled to Inari, a small village in northern Finnish Lapland, in the middle of the Arctic Circle. And as with every trip, we decided to take a special souvenir photo that combines our two passions:

Lilly works as a contemporary dancer, I as a photographer. Of course, it would then be obvious to take a photo of Lilly dancing. The problem, however, would be how do we manage to take a sharp photo of her at night with the Northern Lights in the background that still shows movement?

For that, we had to work with additional light, especially when it was pitch black outside. A strobe was not an option because it rather freezes motion in a photograph. So we decided to use a continuous light source in combination with a long exposure and merge together several images from the same perspective in Photoshop. Nothing has been created with AI.
So, on a tripod, I took one photo of the landscape and the Northern lights without her, one photo of her (while light-painting her with yellow light), one photo to capture the light shape she created while dancing with a translucent light tube.

It took us a few attempts, while freezing in -25°C outside.

To find out more about our process make sure to check out my newest blog post:
https://matthiasdengler.com/blog/2024/1/18/dancing-with-the-lights-bts

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