Skye, the deliverer of goodness

It was Friday night, I'd only slept for 45 minutes the night before and we were itching to take a break. A gap in the schedule meant we weren't due to shoot until Saturday afternoon so we decided to go out for a *few* drinks in the small village (town?) of Portree. Fast-forward to 3am and a full sampling of the finest Whiskey around coupled with bumping into a group of beautiful women who took us on a tour of the local nightlife, and you'll have a rough idea of the chaos.

We managed a decent sleep and prepared ourselves for what lay ahead - a full-on nightshoot to capture stars over the Shulista cabins at the very tip of Skye. The weather had held out so far on the shoot and although there was a few clouds dotted around, I was nervous and eager to grab some astro timelapses without rain.

The brief for the shoot was basically to composite slow motion action with timelapse footage so for the cabins, we were to rig in exactly the same positions on two different cabins. Having done this, the main unit went back to the hotel for a warm dinner and local beverages no doubt whilst me, Rob and Tom set up for the final shot which would take us until 5am to complete - only a 6hr shot for 10 seconds of footage ;-)

As you can see from the rig it was pretty mental. The Dynamic Perception Stage 1 Plus was holding out well considering it had a heavy duty lens on, lens heater and a huge cable to power it all running back to 20 V-Lok batteries. At around midnight, the clouds started to part, the temperature dropped rapidly and Rob and Tom took it turns to grab some sleep in the van and try and keep warm whilst I basked in my natural element, the cold.

I looked towards the distance and noticed a wisp of white cloud moving strangely - it wasn't very windy and my aurora-radar kicked in as I've seen it a number of times now. Holy shit were amongst the words I were shouting - 'I can see the northern lights'! I checked the shot on the camera and there they were - creeping over the horizon. Rob was asleep but he soon woke up. They grew stronger and stronger with bright green and red. To place the cherry on an already delightful and sexual cake, the milky way dropped into frame as it started - mission accomplished. We travelled back to the hotel in Portree and whilst the guys went to bed, I decided I'd take on another step in pleasing the client.

I was exhausted but switched on the laptop and rendered out a clip. For those not in the know, this means copying files from the camera, importing them into Lightroom (a program for adjusting pictures) then rendering them, compiling the pictures into a video so I had a playable timelapse sequence, ready to show the client as a breakfast treat.

Come 8am, dazed and confused and still without sleep, I whipped out the laptop and showed the crew the shot - not the most epic aurora display I've shot but very happy considering we only had one attempt at it and the weather, for once worked in our favour. An actual round of applause later (first time for this to happen to me!) and smiles all round, we departed Skye and headed to our next destination: Arisaig.