This article is part of the Complete Guide to Photography in Lofoten
Despite its remote location, Lofoten is one of the most rewarding photography destinations in the world. There are incredible locations around every corner, and you don’t have to travel far around the islands to uncover new scenes of the fjords, mountains, and views over the ocean. Lofoten is an inspiring photography location, and it's easy to capture some great images among the beautiful arrangements of peaks and shoreline.
However, every destination has its quirks and features that it helps to understand before you go. The geography of Lofoten is like almost no other place on earth, and the extreme changes in the light and character of the landscape make it an incredibly varied location. This article captures my most helpful advice for planning a photography trip to Lofoten.
Choose the season first
Lofoten in summer and Lofoten in winter are almost two different destinations, and it helps to make a conscious decision about which one you want to visit. This may be driven by your availability, but if you have a choice between travelling in summer or winter, a good way to approach the decision is by treating the seasons as two different destinations.
In the summer, Lofoten is colourful and bright, with some periods of 24-hour light and gentle, soft light that lasts throughout the night. You’ll have opportunities to kayak and hike, need to plan for photography very late at night, and capture a set of images of vivid mountains and coastline.
In the winter, Lofoten can appear as minimalist shapes, almost in black and white, with long periods of dark and shorter opportunities to get out and capture the light. You’ll have the chance to photograph the aurora and the beautiful pink and light blue tones of the arctic winter. Your images will have a consistent atmosphere of crisp snowy peaks and hopefully some bursts of colour from the northern lights or a vivid sunrise.
Both summer and winter are beautiful in Lofoten, but they are very different, and the season of your visit is the first decision to make.
Work out a daily schedule
Whatever time of year you visit Lofoten, it’s likely that the best time of day will interfere with the times you usually prefer to eat or sleep. Whenever you are travelling for photography, think carefully about how your daily schedule can get you out in the best light, but with enough energy to make the most of it.
Managing energy is one of the most underrated skills in photography, but going out hungry or with no sleep reduces our creativity, and it will have as significant an impact on your images as the gear you bring and the location you choose. We do our best work when we are prepared, energetic and well-rested; photography is no different from every other endeavour where you need to use your body and your mind.
What works at one time of year in Lofoten won’t work for another; Northern Norway experiences periods of 24-hour dark in winter and 24-hour light in summer. However, a little time to look up sunrise and sunset and consider them from the perspective of sleep and energy will help you design a schedule that gets the most out of the landscape.
For example, in early February, the sun rises around 9 am and sets around 4 pm, a short window in which to capture the light. In this scenario, I’d eat a good breakfast and get on location an hour before sunrise. I'd bring a packed lunch to avoid wasting any light, and return to base for a rest after the sun sets. In the evening, I would watch the sky for aurora or head out for astrophotography, and then plan enough sleep to be rested for sunrise the next day (with a few aurora alerts at night if the sky was due to be clear).
On a longer trip, the sunrise and sunset times can shift considerably, and it’s always worth thinking about your daily plan to maintain your energy for the best conditions.
Practice astrophotography before you go
If you plan to visit Lofoten in the winter, you may be shooting in the dark. If you’ve never had any experience with astrophotography or night shooting, invest an hour or two in practising at home before you go, and you’ll be better prepared for a cold Lofoten evening.
It’s not enough to memorise the camera settings and equipment you need for night shooting; there are other skills which are much easier to develop with practice. Focusing in the dark is more difficult, and framing your subject can be a challenge. You’ll need to learn how to operate your camera using a head torch, including changing lenses and attaching a tripod.
Most photographers hope to capture the aurora in Lofoten, and that moment can be intense the first time you are on location under a clear sky at night. If that’s the first time you’ve tried using your camera in the dark, you’ll waste the moment trying to work out the basics of setting up, framing and focusing before you even start on camera settings.
Don’t waste your first moments in front of the aurora learning night photography; take some time to practice with the night sky before you go.
Learn to use a wide-angle lens
The landscape in Lofoten invites sweeping vistas that encompass the peaks, the ocean and the sky, and you’ll find many viewpoints where you’ll want to capture as much of the scene as possible. The most useful piece of camera equipment in Lofoten is a good wide-angle lens that can take advantage of the open landscape and incredible views.
However, there is a skill to using a wide-angle lens, and it’s one of the most important areas of composition for capturing the landscape. Simple views of large-scale scenes can look underwhelming as we try to capture the sense of scale and perspective in a tiny frame, and we need to think carefully about composition to get the most from the landscape at a small focal length.
This can include learning to hunt for foregrounds that you can pair with a mountain for a balanced composition, looking for larger shapes and patterns in the scene to provide structure to a large-scale image, or paying attention to colours and shapes that might form the basis of a wide-angle composition.
The best place to start is with existing photographs of Lofoten and other large vistas, considering why some images work and what we can learn from them.
Go out in any weather
Lofoten is a series of islands running out into the Atlantic, and its geography results in very unpredictable weather. The islands have mountain peaks and a position far offshore, features that make predicting the weather very difficult.
While Lofoten can get beautiful clear skies, it can also rain or snow under heavy cloud for days or weeks. Moments of light can be fleeting, and dry weather can’t be relied on to last for more than a few hours. The climate in Lofoten is all about change and uncertainty, and it’s important to factor this into your approach to photography.
Weather predictions in Lofoten can be a reasonable guide to the future, but you can’t rely on the forecast, and that advice works in both directions. Don’t start a long mountain hike on a clear day without preparing for the weather to turn while you are out, even if the forecast is positive. However, don’t give up on a rainy day while there is still available light; keep moving and searching, and you might find that the sky unexpectedly clears.
As photographers, we are always hoping for a break in the clouds and a moment of light, but no forecast can tell you with certainty whether that will happen, especially in Lofoten. Go out prepared for anything, but always go out.
Manage your expectations
Visiting a popular photography location like Lofoten has advantages and disadvantages. There are so many great photographs that it’s easy to find inspiration and discover good locations. However, it can also raise our expectations when we see the possibilities, and most photographers secretly hope they’ll have some good luck and capture an incredible portfolio of Lofoten images in just one visit.
However, there’s a lot to capture, and good light is fleeting. Photographers with a beautiful collection of Lofoten images have usually visited multiple times and persevered through days of snow and rain. Try to be realistic about how many great photographs it's possible to capture on a single trip, and accept that some time will be lost to bad weather.
Some of my most enjoyable photography trips have not been those where I captured the best images. Knowing that we got the most out of the scenes we found can be very satisfying, and those photographs are often more meaningful than one stunning photograph where we happened to be in the right place at the right time.
If you research Lofoten images in dull weather with no light, you can find plenty of inspiration from photographers who have used heavy clouds and snow to their advantage. It also helps to plan shoots for bad weather and consider how every scene might look in different conditions. You may not return with all the images you hope to capture in Lofoten, but you can control how you approach the weather and light you find.
Further photography advice for Lofoten
Researching and preparing for a Lofoten photography trip will have a huge effect on the images you can capture. You'll do better in bad weather by considering compositions that work best on a dull or snowy day. Identifying the best locations and areas that feel under-explored can help you invest your time in the right spots. The more you learn before travelling, the more you'll get out of the visit.
A photography trip to Lofoten can be more of a gamble than in most locations, which rarely have such a dense collection of great locations clustered in a landscape so vulnerable to the changes in weather. However, you can improve your chance of capturing a great image by exploring as much as possible whenever there is potential light.
There is a lot more information about Lofoten photography available. For more on logistics and travel, check out my complete guide to photography in Lofoten. To learn more about specific locations, I have an article about the best Lofoten photography spots.
For more information on planning a photography trip to Lofoten, with a detailed map of photography spots and other useful travel information, check out my Photography Travel Guide to Lofoten.
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