28.11.2016

Travelling in Norway

28.11.2016

Travelling in Norway

This is my final piece for the Manfrotto blog and I’ve saved the best for last. This job was a complete pleasure to work on as I was testing the new Olympus OM-DE-M1 Mark II ahead of its official announcement in Australia. In order to really put the system to the test I chose to go to Norway and, unlike so many of my jobs, I was exclusively in charge of travel arrangements and logistics. What a field day I had!

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Token Tripod Selfie, Here I am on my first day in Norway testing out the brand new Olympus OM–DE-M1 Mark II on my brand new Gitzo tripod. I felt pretty spoiled that trip.

I chose to bring two wonderful creative along for the ride; Jewels Lynch and Matt Raimondo. The three of us had almost a week and a half with bags of professional Olympus equipment and some pretty special destinations. My new Gitzo tripod obviously came along for the trip and the lightweight carbon fibre combined with the lightweight camera meant I could cart the whole kit around in one hand. I was in absolute heaven!

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Fall House Reflection, Believe it or not this was a simple roadside stop! Norway was that gorgeous that even the sides of the road stops were triggering hour-long shoots.

On any of my campaigns I generally try and use a tripod as much as possible and Norway was no exception. I was using filters a lot and my shutter speeds were slow enough that I really needed to. Interestingly the new Olympus has such incredible image stabilization that I was hand holding some shots at ¼ second. For most of my daytime long exposure work and golden hour I was much slower than that.

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Bergen Dawn, I decided to start our Norway trip in Bergen as it is the gateway to the Fjord lands of Norway. Little did I know the city itself would be so photogenic!

If you’re ever going to be in a country with a new camera and great gear, Gitzo tripod, Lee Filters etc., then Norway is a pretty good place to be. We were absolutely spoiled for choice with the places we visited and the landscapes on offer. Most of my favorite shoots were actually side of the road stops and that included the below jetty shot which was behind a petrol station, we couldn’t believe it.

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Afternoon Jetty Hangs, Deep in the Fjords we pulled over to the petrol station and realized this was out the back. Honestly Norway!

My most hilarious memory of the trip was a shoot we did at a hidden waterfall that wasn’t even sign posted. As I was hiking in to get closer to the falls I stepped ankle deep into a pool of water and when I finally made it over to some stable ground I dropped my filter holder and polarizer filter as I was setting up my tripod. As it plonked into the water I realized that I would never be able to find it as the fast moving water was creating too much white wash. All of a sudden a genius idea struck me and I connected an action cam to my mobile and lowered it into the water to have a look around. Can you believe that it worked and I retrieved my filters super easily.

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Matt Waterfall, Our awesome videographer for the Norway trip also doubled as a handy model  

As of right now I am still waiting for Adobe to update their RAW convertor so that I can edit my RAW files from the trip. Everything that you see here has been edited from a JPEG. For those beginner photographers that are reading this, a RAW file just gives you a lot more freedom when you’re editing your photos whereas a JPEG is an already compressed image, straight from camera, that requires very little editing.

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Hand Held Slow Shutter, Although I did most of my photography in Norway on the tripod I also tested out the image stabilization on the new camera I was using and was very impressed. ¼ second hand held.

I know that I haven’t talked much about the destination itself but that’s because it was a brand trip and I was specifically there to test equipment. I will tell you that Norway is a gorgeous destination for photography. We went to Bergen, Lofoten Islands and Tromso and experienced the Northern Lights, saw Orca and shot through every type of weather you can imagine. I’m really hopeful I can edit more of my shots in the coming weeks and share them all online.

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Whale Bird Mountain, I took this photo, looked at it on the back of my camera and literally said ‘Well that’s not ugly’. Haha.

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Moody Beach Selfie, The tripod always comes in handy when it’s selfie time.

Lauren Bath

Instagram: @laurenepbath

Facebook: www.facebook.com/LaurenBathServices

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