mountains

Senja and Lofoten, part 8: The most incredible place

When you read 'Lofoten Islands in winter', what do you think of? Mountains? Snow? Ice? Fjords? Small fishing villages? I thought of all of those, and more. To actually be there was a dream come true. On the third day in Lofoten, I drove southwards toward the end of the islands. The weather had calmed considerably from the days before. And even though there was a bit of cloud on the sky, it was that nice sort of cloud that just looks great. Even though my drive southward was only about 1 hour long, it took me about three times that.

Behind the red shed, the little outcrop, was where I took the sunset image you can see in the previous post.

And in the other direction, my trusty, thirsty steed. Wherever you look around these parts, there is a pointy mountain.

I mean, come on!

So yeah, I stopped along the way. A lot. But can you really blame me? I just do not have the words to describe my feelings on this day. I was in paradise. Lofoten is unlike any place I've ever been in, and to be able to see and experience it during a day like this was just... incredible. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Crystal clear.

Bridges to Fredvang.

After many, many stops I finally got to Hamnøy for the scouting. It didn't take me long to find the location I was looking for.

Either this...

...or this. I'd choose the final one next morning.

While I was here, I took the opportunity to walk around to see if there were other shots to be had. I knew where I'd have to be the next morning, but there might still be some hidden gems somewhere. 

This guy had the right idea. But what is he taking a photo of?

Ah, yes.

View south-west.

View south-east towards the mainland. This actually gave me an idea that bore fruit the next morning.

Locals.

I wandered around for an hour or so, watching the sea, boats and birds, and just enjoying the views. I was getting hungry though, so it was time for another delicious Outdoor Deluxe Meal. The location this time was Djupfjorden, that has a convenient parking spot built on a scenic position. I took a photo of the small fjord itself, and then settled down for my lunch. The eagles the day before were on my mind, so before I did anything with the portable stove, I strapped on my birding setup. Just in case.

Small and cozy. I'd love to take a photo that would show the scale of the place, but there just is no way to do it from this vantage point.

I sat on the ledge that you can see above, looking out towards the sea (behind me in this shot). I had the bag of food in my left hand and a spoon in my right. And on my right side, hanging from my shoulder harness, my tele lens with the correct settings dialed in. Mid-chew, I looked to my left, put the bag of food down beside me, lifted my camera, and fired of a full burst. Afterwards I put down the camera, picked up my food and continued eating.

It was time to head back. I had a plan to get to a particular beach for sunset, Skagsanden beach. On the way I couldn't resist, and stopped at the same location I was at earlier. The sun had shifted a bit, shining nice side light on the mountains so that I could do nice panoramas that I'll put on my wall at some point. 

The beach was absolutely packed. I stopped counting at a hundred photographers, it was simply mental. I was a bit late, again, so didn't really have a good pick of compositions. I tried my best, but my heart wasn't really in it. It had been a long day, and I was really tired. And happy about all the photos I had already gotten that day. I also knew I had an early start the next day; there was no chance I'd miss sunrise at Hamnøy.

It had been a crazy, long day. Writing this, I know I should try more to describe what I felt, but mostly I was just overwhelmed. And that's really not that strange. Now, I just look at the images, and smile.

After sunset when most of the photogs had left. I should've put more effort in, such as focus stacking the image. But I was already half asleep.

Sunset at Skagsanden. Would've been great, were it not for the footsteps of some idiot.

Senja and Lofoten, part 5: Northern Senja and the Norther Lights, part 3

When my alarm bell rang at 4:30 am, I ignored it. I tried to sleep well into the morning, but only managed a few hours at a time before waking up again. Late in the morning I made breakfast and loaded up the photos from yesterday, eagle first. When I noticed they were all blurry, I was devastated. How could I have been such a numpty?

Looking at the aurora shots next, the only thing I could think of was how I missed the best action completely. And although I had a slightly better foreground, I wasn't happy with the compositions either. All in all, it wasn't a very good morning. Still, I soldiered on; I only had so much time here.

I had two days left on Senja, and the plan as to explore the northern part of the island. There was a nice-looking rest area / picnic spot slightly north of the viewing platform I'd been to before that I wanted to check out. The place is called Tungeneset, and it's basically a smaller outcrop between two larger outcrops of mountain. A very nice place to spend a few hours, which I did. The sea was calm and the sun was out again after the clouds the day before.

Popular place, evidently.

I walked around, trying different compositions, knowing that I'd be back for sunset. After another outdoor lunch, I headed further north along the road to see what I could find. 

Cormorants chilling in the shadow of a mountain.

The village of Mefjordvær doesn't get any sun during winter.

The peaks on the north side do, however. Low tide brings out a lot of great detail on a beach, it's a shame we don't really get tides in Finland.

I didn't cover up the viewfinder when I took this shot, apparently. Light leaked in through the back and produced the magenta cast in the middle of the image. Bothers me quite a bit that; I should've realized while I was taking the shot.

I spent a bit too long at the location above; suddenly I realized that the light was fading fast. This was mostly because there was some clouds on the horizon that were dimming the sun way earlier than sunset. I quickly returned to my car and drove back to the picnic area, which fortunately wasn't that far. I wasn't alone, of course; there were maybe a dozen other photographers out on the rocks already, so I had to pick from the spots that were free. The first few compositions I did I wasn't really happy with; I rushed and it showed. Third time was the charm, though, and I was pretty happy with what I got.

One last one. Composition isn't the best, but hey ho :)

As the light faded, I was mostly thinking of a single thing. Photographing the aurora, and doing it right. The forecast hadn't changed, but this night, I'd be ready. A quick dinner later, I loaded the gear and drove to a place I'd been at before. During the morning, I'd realized that it should provide the perfect vantage point, with better views of the sky and mountains. Tonight, I'd be ready. And boy, did I get a show.

Starting out exactly where I wanted them...

Then exploding over the mountain on the left..

This is only a 3 second exposure. Absolutely epic.

...and doing the grand finale back where I wanted it.

I could scarcely believe it. I've never, ever seen anything like it. And this was level 3 activity; the scale goes to 6. Finally happy with what I had gotten, I turned in for the night.

Senja and Lofoten, part 4: Exploring Senja and the Northern Lights, part deux

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. 

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