The Lofoten Islands : A Roadtrip with Fujifilm
One camera, One Lens. This was the dilemma. What photography kit to take to the beautiful Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway.
This wasn’t going to be any kind of landscape photography trip, but more of a road trip that I wanted to document with a small camera system that could still produce lovely film like images.
When embarking on a trip as a photographer, the temptation to fill your bag with numerous lenses and cameras can be overwhelming. At the time, I just so happened to own the Fuji X-Pro 2 camera with a few prime lenses, and so it was the obvious choice.
So into the bag (an Ona Brixton) it went alongside the Fuji 35mm f2 lens, some spare batteries and SD cards and that was it. The Ona Brixton is a lovely leather camera bag which I’ve used for years for my professional wedding and portrait photography work. It may have been a bit overkill for my small kit here, but it allowed some spare room for a water bottle and snacks.
Coming with me on this trip was my dad, and planning commenced a few months prior, going old school with no sat navs and opting to use just a paper map. A total of 4 flights and 1000km of driving awaited. Airbnb’s had been pre-booked, and so we were good to go.
There is pretty much one main road that links these strings of islands that curl out into the Norwegian Sea, the E10, and it is in itself a miracle of engineering.
Long (up to 6km) tunnels cut through the mountains and stunning bridges that all sit well in the landscape. There was always a sense of excitement exiting each tunnel as undoubtedly a stunning vista would await that would cue stopping the car and getting the cameras out.
The Lofoten Islands are incredibly unspoilt, tiny villages hugging the base of huge snow-topped mountains, with crashing Arctic surf and weather that changes at the press of a shutter button. We visited in May, which is the low season so we hardly saw a soul on the roads.
In Winter, tourists come for the Northern Lights, and in Summer for the Midnight Sun. Even when we were there, the sun didn’t set until 11 pm and then popped up again at 3 am. Blackout blinds sell well in Lofoten. Further north than Iceland, during the Winter, an hour of ‘light’ is the best you’ll get for 3 months.
The Fuji X-Pro 2 (which has now been superseded by the X-Pro 3) performed admirably. If I had taken multiple cameras and lenses, it would have ended up being a distraction, with time wasted deciding on what to shoot with.
The Fujifilm kit was the perfect set-up for a road trip to the Lofoten Islands. If I had been going to shoot landscapes then the lens choices would have been different as well as needing a tripod and filters.
Norway is an incredibly beautiful country and just a short and inexpensive flight from the UK, so if you are considering visiting I’d highly recommend it.
