With 2nd Shot At Life, She Seized The Light

When Roslyn Meyer was told she had stage four melanoma, she never imagined that she’d be in Norway 11 years later chasing the aurora borealis with a camera.

When Meyer received her diagnosis, her doctor gave her the news she might not survive. Her husband gave her a 6‑megapixel Elph point-and-shoot camera. Meyer took the camera on trips to France and Ireland.

“When I was taking pictures, I wasn’t worrying about cancer,” she recalled in an interview on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. ​“I lost track of time. I became completely absorbed.”

“I discovered a desire in myself of seeing the world, talking it all in,” she recalled. ​“My time was limited.”

Then, thanks to an experimental treatment, Meyer beat cancer. She had a second shot at life.

And, it turned out, Meyer, a psychologist, had a second trade as well. With an eye for light.

She kept taking photos, learning the trade, upgrading her equipment. They were chosen for display in an anonymous juried show; soon Meyer was selling photos and displaying in galleries, represented by a house in the Chelsea section of New York. (“Explorations,” an exhibit of her work, opens at the Keyes Gallery at the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library, 146 Thimble Islands Road, Stony Creek, with a reception this Sunday, April 3, from 4 to 6 p.m. The exhibit runs through April 27.)

“What else am I going to see?” Meyer asked herself in March 2009, when she learned that she was free of melanoma. ​“Where else do I want to go?”

Her photos document some of the answers to that question. Earlier this month, the quest led her on a ​“photography safari” to capture the aurora borealis (or northern lights). She and 11 other photographers hoped the weather would cooperate for at least one night during the eight-day trip. On the third night, it did, offering an hour-long display of sky-filling wonder. Tripod set in the sand of a beach, Meyer shot away.

“I probably shot a couple of hundred images. My first shot was of this church that was kind of set against the mountain. And then the aurora was in the sky over it,” Meyer recalled. She sent that image to her friends, with a note reading: ​“heaven’s light show.”

Click on or download the above audio file to listen to Meyer describe that experience, and her journey to a later-in-life photography career, on the WNHH radio ​“Dateline New Haven” episode.