snow

Senja and Lofoten, part 7: weather, wind and animals

I woke up for sunset, with a location all mapped out. But when I looked out the window, I saw nothing but snow. The weather in these parts is pretty unpredictable, so I wasn't surprised. Since there was no point in going out, I went back to bed. When I woke up a few hours later, the snow was still going strong.

I had a good breakfast (with real coffee this time, the apartment had a coffee maker!) and started thinking of what to do for the day. There is basically one road going through this part of the islands, and you can drive towards the mainland and towards the sea. For this day, I chose the mainland. I figured since the weather was crap, I could visit the local aquarium instead. I really like aquariums, I don't really know why. There's just something calming about looking at fish slowly swimming around. And after that, if weather permitted, I'd scout the area toward the mainland.

When I finally had everything ready, the clouds had started to clear. I decided to quickly go to my sunrise location to scout it out for the future since it was only a 10 minute drive from the apartment. There was a convenient parking spot there so I parked up, took the camera and walked out on the beach. Even though the light was already a bit harsh, it was a nice scene.

I took a few shots, and turned back to the car. And of course, wouldn't you know it, there was an eagle flying towards the car. And I was 30 meters away from the right lens. The run was a bit slippery, and I had trouble putting on the lens and changing settings. I just caught the bird when it flew past.

A nice location, although there isn't much nice foreground.

Slightly too late, and had the wrong settings again...

...and when the settings were correct it was too late. Damnit.

Good thing that wasn't the only eagle I saw that day. In any case, I took my car and started driving north-east along the main road. The tail end of the bad weather still lingered, and I got a few nice shots of the clouds moving through.

Not a bad place to build a church.

The further I drove, the thicker the clouds got, and soon snow started falling. I was reminded of the drive the day before and took it easy. I wasn't in a hurry anywhere. It wasn't a long drive, and before I knew it, I was at the aquarium. The place looked deserted in the snow storm, but it was open so I walked in and got a ticket.

The aquarium is not that big, and only has local species. I tried to take some photos, but most of them were ruined by the glass. It's tricky to find good angles for the photos, since you basically have to be squared towards the glass, and the fishies and other crawlies typically stay toward the edges. When they do swim in the middle, they are so close to the glass that you pick up all the scratches as well.

I've eaten some of your family.

I had timed my driving so that I'd be at the aquarium when they were feeding some of the animals. One I've seen in person many times, the other not. It was a bit tricky to get a nice angle, and the strong wind and ever-present snow didn't help. But persistence pays off and I got a few nice photos in the end. I'd prefer if these were wild animals, but I'll take what I can get.

It's my spirit animal! <3

Omnomnom.

So cute!

What you typically see of seals. Rarely this close, though :)

I went back inside after the feeding to dry off and check out the rest of the exhibits, and just chilling. I wasn't in a hurry anywhere, the weather being what it was. One of the nicer images I got was this:

Lemme out!

After the aquarium it was time for lunch, so I drove into Kabelvåg for a nice burger; I needed something different than the adventure meals :) The weather did clear a bit while I was eating, so I continued the drive towards the mainland. But I didn't get very far. A truck had stopped seemingly random in the middle of the road and two cars had stopped behind it. I was just wondering what the problem was when the truck put on it's emergency blinkies, so I stopped behind the other cars. A minute later a fire truck stopped beside us and a fireman came to my window. A truck had driven a bit too fast on the road and had lost control. The fireman said that I could wait for them to clear the road, which could take a few hours, or to turn back. I read the local news later, the truck had flipped in a corner and a car of tourists had driven into the back. Luckily no one was hurt, but it had taken quite a while to remove all the fish that had spilled all over the road.

You can probably guess I turned back, and drove even more carefully back towards Leknes. The weather was really bad where the accident had happened, but it soon cleared and I could take some more roadside shots.

Not exactly boating weather.

I love the scale in this photo. That bridge isn't small, but it's still dwarfed by the mountain beside it. And you can't even see the mountaintops!

I was standing on the beach taking the pictures above, enjoying the fast clouds, when I looked back over my shoulder. There was a black lump on the ground that I was pretty sure hadn't been there before. Could it be? I pointed my camera at it since I had a longer lens on, and yes, it was. This time my car was closer, and the bird was sitting still. I was NOT going to mess this up.

Ohai.

The eagle just sat there while I moved gingerly closer. When the eagle turned into the wind, I knew what was happening; large birds like this have to take flight into the wind, especially when it was this windy. And I was ready.

After this particular stop, every time when I put away my camera in the back of the car, I put my birding lens on it. Clearly, there are eagles on Lofoten, lots of them. It was just a question of being ready.

At this point the sunset was closing in, and I still had a drive to get to my sunset location. The problem was that I got distracted. A lot. I stopped twice when an eagle flew overhead, and three times for the scenery. The setting sun produced some absolutely gorgeous light and I just couldn't resist.

Proper winds and new, light snow.

The misty mountains

Sky is turning pink already, come on!

As you can see from the picture above I was, once again, cutting it close. This time I knew that there was no way I'd make it to the location I had planned, so I just stopped by the road where I saw some nice light, and went for it. I could have done without the 50 cm of snow on the beach, but it was mostly just an inconvenience.

The water is just crystal clear around these parts. Too bad someone had dropped something into the sea exactly here...

After sunset more clouds rolled in, so I went back to the apartment for some dinner and much-needed sleep. Even though there might be auroras, there wasn't a chance I'd see them through the clouds. The next day it was time to drive south, to visit the legendary village of Hamnøy

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. 

Finally some snow!

If you don't live in Finland, you might think that the winters here are snow-filled and beautiful, the low-hanging sun bathing everything in a wonderful glow. Well, it can be. But where I live, the truth is that winter can suck. Especially in November an December, when the days are getting short and the rain starts pelting down. It's quite typical not to see the sun for weeks on end. The sun rises at 9:30 and sets at 15:30, and when it's overcast it never gets very bright even mid day.

All of that gloom usually has a definitive effect on my mood, that sometimes can be helped with some short trips out to the cabin, and sometimes not. This year was one of those sucky years where I felt miserable the whole time. I actually had to resort to more food photography! More on that later.

As many other photographers, I've been watching a lot of YouTube, hoping a few of my favorites would have some inspiring words. What I got instead, was beautiful, snow and ice-filled woodland and landscapes.. from the UK. If you want to take a look yourself, here's an example from Simon Baxter, who does some beautiful, low-key woodland photography. All in all, I had been waiting for good weather for a few months already. And then, a week after new years, it finally happened. Sun! Cold! Snow! 

Instead of going to my normal places, I decided to go to Kurjenrahka National Park just north of Turku where I live. The reason was twofold; firstly, I had never been there and wanted to check it out, and secondly, I was pretty sure there wouldn't be that many people around. After a short drive I found the parking lot, and swung on my backpack. Almost immediately, I found my first composition.

What drew me to the sight was, well, firstly, I literally walked into it. I was about 50 meters from the parking lot (I could still see my car), but a picture is a picture, so who cares as long as the car isn't in the shot :) Secondly, I liked how the strong tree on the left is contrasted by the thinner, fallen one, and the even thinner felled one. And third, I was super lucky and the sun slightly lit up the trees behind my main subjects, creating nice contrast (in the center of the frame). The path (although you can't really see it in the photo) goes from the bottom off to the right, sidestepping some heaped logs.

One thing I was very strict with this particular day; I always had my camera packed, without a lens on. I also had my tripod with me, and was adamant of using it every single shot. Why? It slows you down. It allowed me to just walk through the forest, looking at nature and enjoying myself. Every now and then something caught my eye; those are the potential photographs. At that point I'd look closer, trying to figure out why I liked it. Many times it wasn't anything worth of a photo, so I left my camera in the bag.

Sometimes, it was most definitely a photo. For those, I took off my backpack so that I could move a bit better, and started to frame the picture in my mind; what focal length would I need, where to put the edges of the frame, how was the light. When I started to think like this, something just clicked. I think I kind of understand the 'take it slow' mentality now. To cap it off, I stumbled on this.

I first noticed the fallen tree, there were in fact two of them, lying almost parallel (the other one is to the left, out of frame). Second, I noticed the light, spilling through from the open area just behind the trees. The sun was out in full force, which really isn't all that much this time of year, but it was just perfect. I found the right spot (without the camera), set up the tripod and camera there, and took the image. Then I packed everything into my bag again, just like my YouTube mentors.

This was turning out to be a really nice day. It was the first time in weeks that I'd seen the sun, I was out in a beautiful forest, and I was getting some photography done. The fact that the area was completely new to me just added to the sense of discovery.

After the photo above, I reached the edge of the forest, where a big swamp started. There were small clouds going in and out in front of the sun, bathing everything in the golden light one minute, and into a blueish gloom the other. I climbed up a bird-watching tower to take in a view over the marshes. Beautiful, but not really worthy of a photo. Some places are just like that; while you are there, it's great, but you just can't capture it. Instead, I tried to think about what made the place so great, to see if I could hone in on that. 

What I saw in front of me was frozen, snow-covered marshland, with small trees everywhere, occasionally in beautiful light. So, it just made sense to me to try to capture that; a simple detail in a vast landscape, that nevertheless tells the story. I tried multiple angles, never being quite happy. I was looking for a single small tree, with nice side light, and a nice white background. I knew there was a lot of marsh to find the picture in, but the clock was against me and I started panicking (taking photos without a tripod). Here are a few of the not-so-good captures I tried:

Small tree, golden light, background. Yes? No. I think it's too cluttered: I wanted simple, this is not it. The two trees were nice though.

Same tree, taken from a higher vantage point to contrast with the snow behind. This makes the tree more isolated. I didn't like this one either.

Maybe towards the sun? I like this one even less. There is too much contrast, and too much stuff going on.

As I was taking the photos above, I started thinking again; the idea was still valid, but my execution was flawed. I wanted simplicity, but was trying to include everything in the frame. I remembered a shot I had taken an hour or do earlier, just to get it. At the time, I thought it was a bit cliche, I just happened to be in the right place when the sun hit a small tree in a clearing. Now, it was everything I was looking for, but couldn't find out in the marsh.

It doesn't have to be difficult. I know it's been done before, but I don't care.

The composition isn't perfect; there's a small tree on the right side that I'd get rid of. The bigger tree in the background should be slightly more to the left. But it's still a nice picture. So, I gave up my search for a small tree in the marsh, and started to think about returning to the car. At this point was around two o'clock, meaning I had about an hour of sunlight left. I'd been out for three hours already, and I was very content with the images I already had. As a final image, I decided to capture the slight s-curve of the path through the marsh; the light was still nice, and s-curves are almost always good subjects. I had to wait about 15 minutes for the sun to show and a few families to get out of shot, but I think was worth it. Having my tripod out again meant I just had to wait for the right time, and press the shutter. No need to re-frame or remember where you where standing.

After driving home and making some food, I looked out my kitchen window to see a beautiful pink sunset. I knew it was a possibility when I left the park; but I was still happy even though I didn't capture it. I knew I had some keepers on the memory card, slowly warming up in my camera bag.

Finally, a few things I learned during the Sunday trip:

  1. If you think it might be good weather for a photo or two, don't hesitate, just go.
  2. Pack all lenses you have, an extra battery, and an extra memory card.
  3. Do not walk around with your camera out. Take your time. Enjoy. The photos will show themselves.
  4. Light is everything. I know it sounds dumb, but I think I'm finally getting it.

Also, I am really starting to dislike my 18-200mm lens. It's just not up to par with my other lenses. Those aren't superb either, but this particular one is really, really bad at most focal lengths. Makes me think on what I'm going to do for my return trip to Norway in a few months...