Last year we celebrated Summer Solstice on our apartments balcony in Tbilisi, this year we did it the right way. After I tried out how it's to move grass with a scythe, then with a trimmer and finally hiring a professional grass mover we started to repair our recent acquisition, after room and kitchen was cleaned out ouf junk and some paint job was applied both to walls and ceilings we did a test with a first garden party in order to prepare for this Summer Solstice night.
Now we were ready to great Sun. Since our property on that time was without electricity we decided to go creative and lightened a lot of candles and put them into jars, hang up them in trees and got a superb Summer Solstice feeling.
During Summer solstice a fire place is a must have, it symbolizes light's victory over dark, and according to some old legends with fireplaces we are helping sun to win this battle. On the other hand we used one of our fireplaces (we had two) to burn all that old junk, while second one just for heating and ... helping sun to fight that battle.
Author of this blog captured in action
Burning junk and old furniture
Candles in jars - outdoor decoration
Summer Solstice fireplace
Those are actually my first successful night shots, back then I for the first time used longer exposures. To make that image steady I put my DSLR camera on the gorilla pad. And I actually love such perspective of grass. Now I feel much better educated on decent night photography, and even have started a new category posts: Digital Photography School
Night of Summer Solstice
This is probably my favorite photography of that night. Did a 30 second long exposure and illuminated background with flashlight (light painting technique).
About Summer Solstice
The summer solstice occurs when the tilt of a planet's semi-axis, in either northern or southern hemispheres, is most inclined toward the star that it orbits. Earth's maximum axial tilt toward the Sun is 23° 26'. This happens twice each year, at which times the Sun reaches its highest position in the sky as seen from the north or the south pole.
The summer solstice occurs during a hemisphere's summer. This is the northern solstice in the northern hemisphere and the southern solstice in the southern hemisphere. Depending on the shift of the calendar, the summer solstice occurs some time between June 20 and June 22 in the northern hemisphere and between December 20 and December 23 each year in the southern hemisphere. The same dates in the opposite hemisphere are referred to as the winter solstice.
When on a geographic pole, the Sun reaches its greatest height, the moment of solstice, it can be noon only along that longitude which at that moment lies in the direction of the Sun from the pole. For other longitudes, it is not noon. Noon has either passed or has yet to come. Hence the notion of a solstice day is useful. The term is colloquially used like midsummer to refer to the day on which solstice occurs. The summer solstice day has the longest period of daylight – except in the polar regions, where daylight is continuous, from a few days to six months around the summer solstice.
Worldwide, interpretation of the event has varied among cultures, but most recognize the event in some way with holidays,festivals, and rituals around that time with themes of religion or fertility.
Solstice is derived from the Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still).