Today, I would like to show you one last little series from Norway. This is about the three big (four-legged) inhabitants of the Norwegian Fjells 😀
Last year we really caught fire with these great animals during the many moose encounters, especially in Lofoten. But as you could notice from the first two series, our focus was different this year - as this time there were finally some windless days with good light, we decided to dedicate these days fully to landscape photography, even though we had actually taken the big telephoto lenses with us for a handful of excursions into wildlife photography.
Because in the photography of large animals I need just as beautiful light, but no calm. It's different in landscape photography - here perfect reflections and calm birch leaves open up many good perspectives.
So at the end of the second week I didn't even expect to bring home an animal series this year, because we didn't want to "sacrifice" more than one day.
But then it turned out differently again: due to several storms the autumn colours were no longer present in most places in the course of the third week. Here are two smartphone pictures for comparison:
Where I had used some great autumn colours from the first landscape series days before, suddenly everything was wintery grey - take a look at this:
At first, we were still photographically occupied with the spots where grasses and lichen-covered rocks dominate and birch colours hardly play a role, such as Storulfossen, where we had a great evening.
But finally, exactly 2 days before the end of our 3-week trip, we had a first, very nice session with the musk oxen. We heard that there were two herds near Hjerkinn and tried to enter in the direction of Snohetta. At first we went much too far, because despite binoculars we saw no oxen. Then we decided to call Stefan Rosengarten, whom we met by chance at the car park and who wanted to start a little later. In the meantime, he had spotted a herd. Thanks to his coordinates, we finally reached the spot quickly and had a short but beautiful session with the musk oxen together with Stefan, Michael and Natascha, among others. Thanks to Stefan at this point, who helped us very well with his experience in mammal photography.
The next morning we tried it a second time - unfortunately there was no usable light, so that it remained for us with this one good session. I have also enriched the series with 5 shots that resulted from two spontaneous animal observations from the car - once a moose that we encountered in the most beautiful evening light and once a herd of reindeer that we were able to observe while driving through a pass road.
In the future, we will certainly devote more time to animal photography in this area - if only because these larger mammals with fuzzy fur can be photographed very well in the backlight and that is a goal for the next visit. Next time we will definitely sacrifice a sunny day 😉 For the moment we were very happy about the great experiences with these animals.
I wish you lots of fun now 🖐
Many greetings,
Thomas
I hope you enjoyed the series 😃🖐