I always loved the old Balto cartoon. Shortly after I began focusing my photography around gemstones, I watched the movie for the first time in a few years. So I'm nostalgic, so what? I got to the scene where Balto took Jenna into the furnace room under that one building and pushed those broken glass bottles into the light, creating a fake aurora borealis on the wall. I've always loved that scene and have always been fascinated by light and what you can do with it.
So I began to wonder. "Can I do that with gemstones?"
I was already kind of doing it, outside in the sun, seeing what kinds of refractions I could get on white paper or posterboard.
But what if I did it in the dark with a more focused light source and really tried to make an aurora borealis?
And so the Home Aurora Borealis shoots, or H.A.B. shoots, were born. I take a gemstone into a dark room late at night so there is no light interference and I shine a pen light through the gem, altering the angles to see what I get.