Been there, done that

The Northern Lights by Yvette Cardozo

I've photographed in cold before, but Fairbanks in January is ridiculous. Four hours outside at minus 45 degrees and no way to escape. Shooting the northern lights in Alaska is always challenging, but this was the worst freeze in a decade.

By the third night, I'd worked out a system. Start with six layers of clothing, add lots of chemical warmers, and valiantly search for some source of heat. That source turned out to be a yurt with a wood stove and a large pot of water for boiling tea.

Using my own body heat to keep the batteries working had proven useless. At some point in this sinking temperature game, nothing outside keeps gear warm enough to function. But in the yurt, the tea-boiling pot had a lid. The lid had a handle. And the handle was perfectly sized to hold my camera batteries.

I jammed a couple of batteries under the handle of the lid for a few minutes to get them warm, ran outside and grabbed maybe half a dozen photos, then ran for the pot to warm the batteries up again. Rotating a half dozen batteries from the yurt into the wild finally made it possible to get the images I wanted.

As for what I shot. Well, the rest of the group was photographing the aurora shimmering above trees. But as I looked around, I noticed there was this really picturesque outhouse ....