Sometimes planning results in an awkward situation. Take Senja for instance; according to the maps, no location would work for sunrise. The reason? Every single mountain range was in the wrong position and/or direction so that the sunrise wouldn't hit it. I was also staying on the west coast, which meant that I couldn't photograph the sunrise itself either.
Now, I could have went out anyway. I'm sure the island has some lovely locations that I could've found. But I didn't. It pains me to say it, but I felt lazy; I was in the most awesome location I've ever been in, and I didn't put in the effort. Instead, I looked through the images from the evening before, to continue the learning process of photographing auroras. I also spent quite some time to make sure I had a sunset location, and trying again to find a sunrise location for the next morning. When I finally headed out, the sun was high in the sky. Luckily there was some light cloud cover to diffuse the light a bit.
There was basically two directions I could go; south or northeast. Even though the distances aren't that long, the small and icy roads mean that it takes a fair amount of time to get from one end of the island to the other. This day, I decided to explore southward, starting with the village of Torsken (literally translated to The Codfish. Yes, it's a fishing village, how did you guess?).
From mid-day to sunset. And yes, that is the only road from one to the other.
The area is truly beautiful. Steep cliffs with empty beaches of sand or rock, covered in snow and ice. I took it easy, stopping often and just wandering around with my camera. As I explored, I took note on how sparsely built this region really is. In villages, the houses are almost touching each other, but of course there aren't that many of them in total. Outside the villages, the houses are few and far between, and all of them are built along the single road. There are no houses or roads on any of the hills, most of them don't even have any trails. Which is fair enough, I can only image the cost of building roads up here. In the end, it makes for a truly pristine landscape. You'll have no trouble at all finding images without any man-made object in them.
View from the village of Torsken. The mountains in the background are the very northern-most parts of the Lofoten islands.
Dappled light on the mountains.
Gryllefjord
I spent half an hour walking around the western-most point of Gryllefjord. Not that the village was anything special in itself, there just happened to be a good parking spot with some nice views. Also, an eagle flew by.
The blue and white color theme is going to be prevalent today :)
You know what's annoying? Not getting your settings correct. I was in a hurry to change lenses and settings, and missed one of the most important ones; the shutter speed is too low. You can clearly see the whole bird is blurry. There is no way of fixing that in post. Damnit.
When I collect cod heads, I'll put them on display too.
I started getting a bit hungry, so it was time for some lunch. And what better than to match that with some location scouting? I'd driven past a nice-looking beach a few times now, but I wasn't sure how it looked up close or how the sun would hit during different times of the day. But first things first:
Outdoor lunch, best lunch.
At this time of year the beach is in shade almost all day, unfortunately. The tide was going out and the receding water had left behind some great detail in the ice. But when there is no light, there isn't, so I decided to move on after taking a proof of concept shot.
Ballesvika (I'm not going to translate that). Shame about the light, this good image could have been an epic image.
The only thing left after the (admittedly very late) lunch was to get to my sunset location in Flakstad. The drive took me through a snow-covered valley, a long tunnel, and a serpentine road down to the water; it's pretty much a minified version of my whole experience of Senja. Once at Flakstad, it didn't take me long to find the composition; a beach, a rock, and a sun-lit mountain worked a treat.
I drove back to my cabin, pleased with the day so far. Of course, I hadn't checked the eagle pictures for sharpness yet... Prioritizing food over processing photos, I made dinner and checked the aurora forecast. It was up from a 2 the day before to a 3. Well then, no rest for the weary.
I had chosen my aurora location so that I'd get some better foreground (underground?) since the photos from the day before had a nice sky, but were pretty meh in the land-part of the landscape. My cabin was very close to the idyllic hotel of Hamn i Senja, that looks great during the day. I was thinking that I'd have that as the bottom part of the picture, with auroras dancing overhead. There was even a convenient place to park my car; during night-time the road was pretty much deserted, so I didn't mind occupying a passing place on a straight bit on the road (never, ever do that in a corner!). Once I'd set up, I took the first shots with my new-found foreground. What I hadn't noticed what that there was something else in frame as well.
Yes, that's the milky way.
The auroras were clearly not out in full force yet. The ribbon stayed in place and was quite faint when seen through human eyes; so I waited. And waited. While I waited, I tried a vertical composition too. The aurora covered pretty much half of the night sky, so I could shoot as wide as I wanted and still get the green. One thing that I was starting to notice though was that my lens (Tamron 15-30mm f2.8) isn't parfocal. That means that every time I changed the focal length, it lost focus. And let me tell you, focusing in pitch black is a nightmare, especially since the focus marker on the lens isn't accurate. A few mm on the focus ring is enough to throw the whole shot out of focus, and you wont notice until you look closely after the fact:
The way I did it in the end, was to turn on live view and find a light source. In the photo above it was easy, since the lights in Hamn were easy to find even though the screen was mostly black. Then I zoomed all the way in on the light and manually turned the focus ring so the light was as sharp as I could get it, and then not touch the focus again until I changed my composition. If I accidentally touched the zoom ring, I had to do the same thing over again.
After two hours of taking the same picture over and over again, I had enough and decided to change position. So I drove to the island of Hamn itself and found a dark corner looking northward (the direction the above shots are taken). The aurora had dissipated a bit at this point, so the images were not very good at all, especially when I had even less foreground here than I had earlier.
The aurora picked a good place on the horizon to land, at least.
A half an hour of this and I was done. The clearly wasn't going to be any action, the clock was nearing 1 am. I picked up my tripod and started heading back to the car. I turned a corner at the cabins where I had hidden from the harbor lights, and saw what was the craziest aurora I'd ever seen. It looked as if the sky was on fire. The aurora danced around, changing form by the second. You could actually see the rays falling from space as they painted their own color streaks on the night sky. I wish I could say I caught it on camera. By the time I had my camera down and a composition ready and focused, the aurora had switched again, now being straight on top of me. I just could not keep up. Even my settings were wrong; the 10-20 second exposure I'd used earlier was way too slow, making the beautiful, stark rays of the aurora into a green muddy mess. In short, I was so awestruck that I was caught completely off guard. Of the hundred pictures I took, only three turned out good in the end, and they did not capture the absolutely stunning display I had seen.
I know this looks crazy. But this was taken AFTER the real action, when I'd gotten my bearings.
6 seconds of crazy.
The display only lasted 15 minutes or so, after which the aurora quickly faded away. I was cold and tired, and my head was still spinning. Although I was exhausted, I didn't get much sleep that night.