I am truly flattered and surprised to have won First Prize given the quality of the other photographers' submissions in this contest. It means more to me because as a voting contest, my "peers" decided the outcome. Thank you! My name is Rob Darby and I live in San Francisco. Clearly, this photo was not taken in California, but rather near Kiruna, Sweden on a photography tour I took this February above the Arctic Circle in Norway/Sweden. This night was spectacular with the aurora racing across the sky, sometime pausing, forming curtains of color, and then changing again. I took this shot with a Nikon D4S, Nikkor 24 mm/1.4 lens, f/1.4, ISO 2000, 6 second exposure. I did only minor post-processing: slight color saturation, sharpening, and noise reduction in Photoshop. Some of my other work can be found at 500px.com/darbyrob. Thank you again for the recognition.
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