Light Pillars - one of the rarest, or indeed the rarest of all the night photography phenomena to capture, at least that has been my experience in over 15 years of astrophotography around the world.
In all my research I have only seen one other occasion where these have been captured in New Zealand, so I am stoked to have this image from one of the more remarkable places in New Zealand!
Light pillars only occur when a series of events all coincide at the same time, which is why there are so elusive. These include a rapid cooling in the atmosphere and a dense moist cooling of water into ice crystals and must be above a bright light source such as towns or cities for the effect to be drastically seen. This is why many people have never heard of this because it is just that rare.
At first I thought this was lens fog or some light flare from the town below but I soon knew exactly what this was and knew I had to act fast and capture what I could with precision. And sure enough ,within five minutes out was all over. I knew I had just witnessed one of the most amazing things in my photography journey so far! I must admit there were some pretty loud screams of excitement from this mountain top that I knew no one would very get to witness as I was all alone in the - 11ºc night at near 2000m elevation.
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