The Lofoten Islands | A Road Trip

You know when you see or hear about a place that sounds utterly beautiful and special, and just sticks in your mind, bugging you relentlessly until you give in and book a flight there?   Well the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway was just such a place for me and my father Alan.

My father had a special birthday this year and so what better thing as a gift than to get him an experience that neither he or I would forget.  A road trip in Lofoten.

Planning commenced a few months prior, going old school and using a paper map!  So nice to ditch the sat nav for a change!  A total of 4 flights and 1000km of driving awaited.

There is pretty much one main road that links these string of islands that curl out into the Norwegian Sea, the E10, and 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 undoubtably 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, crashing Arctic surf and weather that changes at the press of a shutter button.   We visited in May which is the low season so hardly saw a soul on the roads.  Bliss!

In Winter folks come for the Northern Lights, and in Summer for the Midnight Sun.   Even when we were there the sun didn’t set until 11pm and then popped up again at 3am!   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 people that live in Lofoten are incredibly friendly and I even managed to arrange a great wedding elopement shoot on a beach that could rival many around the tropics (although maybe a tad colder!) and which you can see here.

I took my newly acquired Fuji X-Pro2 for this trip, along with the Fuji 35mm f2 and Samyang 12mm f2, both of which performed admirably and the Fuji’s weather sealing came in handy at times!  In fact I’ve been so impressed by this camera it will undoubtably be one I’ll be using more for my wedding photography in the future.

We’ve both been fortunate to have done our fair share of travelling to date, both for work and pleasure, and seen some pretty dramatic landscapes, but this place is really something else.   When the flight descends through the clouds and reveals the vista in this first image the heart rate goes up a notch that’s for sure.

Thanks for having us Lofoten, we’ll be back.