Category : Fairbanks, AK

Everything a photographer knows about the shape of a day stops applying at sixty-five degrees north, and that is the single most useful thing to understand about Fairbanks. Three numbers explain why. At the summer solstice there are something close to twenty-two hours between sunrise and sunset, and the sun does not go far enough below the horizon for astronomical night to occur at all — from roughly mid-May to late July there is no true darkness here. The sun sets shortly after midnight and rises again before three, and the hours between are a prolonged civil twilight.

At that same solstice the sun's maximum elevation is only about forty-nine degrees, which means Fairbanks never experiences the near-overhead sun that ruins the middle of the day at every venue in the southern half of this library. There is no bad hour here in summer, because the sun never gets high enough to make one — and a midday ceremony in June is a perfectly good photographic proposition, which is worth telling a couple who have been advised otherwise from a general rule.

And at the winter solstice there are under four hours between sunrise and sunset with the sun peaking at barely two degrees: on the shortest day it skims the horizon and never properly rises, so the entire daylight period is the low, long-shadowed, warm-toned condition that a photographer anywhere else waits all day for and gets for twenty minutes. So there is no golden hour at Fairbanks.

In summer there is a golden evening running six or seven hours, roughly from nine at night to one in the morning, when the sun is at its lowest while still up — golden hour extended to the length of a working shift, with the constraint being the wedding party's stamina rather than the sun's position. In winter there is a golden day running three or four hours. And in the shoulder seasons there is something closer to a normal day, which is when most people photograph here and which is, photographically, the least interesting option.

That inverts every scheduling instinct in this collection: elsewhere the job is to protect twelve minutes, and here it is to choose which of several hours to use. One further consequence of the latitude catches people out. The sun's azimuth swings enormously — in midsummer it rises in the north-north-east, travels through east and south, and sets in the north-north-west, covering close to three hundred degrees of horizon — so the direction light arrives from changes constantly and dramatically, and a position beautifully side-lit at four in the afternoon is backlit by nine and front-lit by midnight.

Walk the property and note which elevations work at which hours, because almost every position is good at some point in a twenty-two-hour day; you simply have to know when. And note what summer removes: there is no dusk in the usual sense, because the sky never reaches the deep blue an artificial-light frame needs, so balance-point photography — the technique that structures the end of a day at every other venue in this collection — simply does not exist at Fairbanks in June.

The aurora is why many couples come here and it needs honest framing in the first conversation. Fairbanks sits under the auroral oval, which makes it one of the more reliable places on the planet to see it, and the requirement is darkness — so it is not visible in summer at all. The season runs roughly late August to mid-April. Beyond the season it needs clear sky, geomagnetic activity and patience, none of which can be promised for a particular night, and staying several days improves the odds considerably.

The technique is a fast wide lens, manual focus set to infinity in advance because autofocus will not work on a dark sky, a sturdy tripod, high sensitivity and exposures of a few seconds — longer exposures blur the aurora's structure, and the structure is the subject, so shorter and noisier beats longer and smooth. To include the couple, light them briefly and at low power during the exposure: a small flash or a short burst of continuous light freezes them while the sky records, and warming that light slightly separates their skin from the green.

Two people can hold still for four seconds; ten is unrealistic, and at minus twenty-five so is standing out there for long, so agree the number of attempts in advance. Snow is the winter half's great gift and it is the best natural fill light there is. Fresh snow reflects a very high proportion of the light falling on it, so a snow-covered landscape becomes a reflector the size of the world, throwing light upward into faces from below — eye sockets fill, jaws soften, and a portrait outdoors needs no card, no reflector and no flash.

That is the exact opposite of the desert, where nothing comes back at all. Two technical notes: a mostly white scene gets metered as mid-grey and comes back one to two stops underexposed, so add compensation and check a histogram rather than trusting a screen; and snow in shade is genuinely blue, strongly, because it is reflecting a blue sky — that is correct rather than an error, and neutralising it makes the snow grey and dead, so leave shaded snow blue and warm only the faces. Extreme cold also produces optical effects that exist almost nowhere else.

Around minus thirty-five and below, suspended ice crystals cause halos around the sun, bright spots either side of it, and vertical pillars of light above lamps, while ice fog forms wherever there is moisture and turns the air itself into a diffuser, producing a soft strange luminous flatness. None of these can be planned and all are worth recognising and shooting immediately. Working here in the cold half of the year is a genuinely different craft and a handful of practical facts matter more than any aesthetic advice.

Cold kills batteries: lithium cells lose a large part of their capacity at low temperature, and at minus thirty a battery that lasts a day in a temperate climate may last an hour, so carry several times what seems necessary and keep spares in an inside pocket against your body, because a cell that reads dead when cold will often recover once warmed. Condensation is the serious equipment risk and the rule is counter-intuitive — going from cold into warm causes it, so a camera at minus thirty carried into a heated lodge will condense moisture on and inside it, including on the sensor and within the lens.

Seal the camera in a plastic bag while still outside, carry it in sealed, and let it reach room temperature over an hour before opening, every time rather than when you remember. Going the other way is easier but not free: a warm camera taken into extreme cold fogs briefly then clears, and the focus and zoom rings stiffen, so carry equipment out fifteen minutes early or it will fog exactly as the wedding party arrives.

And your hands are the limiting factor, because at minus thirty bare skin on metal is an injury risk and dexterity disappears within a minute — thin liner gloves under heavier mitts, operating in liners for short bursts only. That is why a winter session here is planned as ten minutes rather than an hour, and it applies far more to the couple, who are dressed for photographs rather than for the weather. Be the person who insists on coats between frames. The boreal forest is the landscape and it has one genuinely northern signature.

White spruce, paper birch, quaking aspen and balsam poplar grow on the better ground, and black spruce on permafrost — stunted, thin, and often leaning at odd angles because the ground beneath them thaws unevenly, which produces a strange and very northern-looking forest worth photographing for what it is. Pale birch trunks against snow are a superb graphic background and the most reliably good one on any property here in winter.

Autumn is very early and very short: birch and aspen turn gold in the second half of August and are largely down by mid-September, so the entire colour season is two to three weeks, and it coincides with the return of darkness and therefore with the start of the aurora season. That makes late August into early September the single most photographically rich window of the year at this latitude — gold birch, dark spruce, a proper evening with a genuine dusk for the first time since spring, and the first aurora of the year.

March and early April is the other favourite among people who work here: still full snow and still aurora season, but with a rapidly lengthening day and far less severe cold, which makes everything outdoors practical again. The two periods to be careful about are deep midwinter, where the light is permanently beautiful and the welfare constraint on anything outdoors is severe, and break-up in late April and May, which is mud and grey snow and the least attractive weeks of the year — the one window to advise against. Two closing practicalities.

Interior Alaska gets genuinely warm in summer, with high twenties Celsius entirely normal, and that combined with continuous daylight produces mosquitoes in numbers that are not exaggerated in the stories, which will determine how long anybody stands anywhere outdoors between June and August. And establish what any venue actually offers in the season under consideration, and what its heated interior holds as a number — because at this latitude in winter the indoor space is not a contingency for bad weather. It is the venue, and everything outside is a short excursion from it.