Land of the Midnight Sun

Last June I got to go to Norway for the first time, booked to travel to the small island of Skrova for a photographic workshop, and was very happy that the gorgeous Fredau was going too (the bloody beautiful human being that she is).
I flew from London to Oslo (where I bumped into Fredau incoming from elsewhere in Europe) and we flew another hour or so from Oslo to Bodø, then a boat trip to Skrova.
After already taking two flights I was thinking the ‘highspeed’ boat trip might be like 45 minutes? Granted I didn’t pay great attention to that part of the itinerary, but I did laugh when Fredau informed me it was a further 3 hours!! 😀 Woah we were really going north!!

As the boat journeyed into pale misty waters, it was clear we were heading for a totally different land, following a path between clusters of mountains and rocks extruding out from the ocean, looming jagged and mysterious. We arrived onto the island [where only around 250 people actually live] and settled into the little fisherman’s house we were staying.
I need to add, bearing in mind I had been travelling ALL day…. there was a strange thing going on as the evening drew to a close – it wasn’t getting dark. We’d planned the trip leading up to June 21st, the longest day of the year, and as Skrova is situated within the Arctic Circle, that meant no ‘night-time’, but continuous daylight. We had come to shoot in the land of the Midnight Sun! 🙂

This meant we often worked super late and into the early hours, laying in the next morning to catch up on sleep or napping through the day. I happened to have just finished a great book called ‘The Age of Miracles‘ – about a sudden and unexplained ‘slowing’ of the earth resulting in increasingly lengthened hours of light and darkness, and the effects it had on nature, society & people’s lives. It was a well-timed read, and very thought-provoking, leaving me with an extra sense of strange allure and fascination for this strange phenomenon. Naturally for someone who has always been used to night turning dark, I was quite tripped out to see seagulls flying merrily outside my window in a bright blue sky as I crawled into bed at 3am. I was appreciative for my sleep mask and black-out blinds 🙂

During the daytime if the weather was fine we would venture out to explore, and in glorious sunshine we hiked over hillsides, beaches and rocks to discover some incredible lagoons and ocean pools. The water was a fantastic aqua and the sand was pure white, giving a deceivingly tropical-looking foreground to the more sinister Peter Pan’s ‘Neverland’ style backdrop… what an amazing landscape!!!

Stunning images by Trond M. Skaret… look at those colours!!!

There were lots of pretty flowers in bloom in the summery meadows and gorgeous shells and driftwood to photograph along the beaches….

When it was gloomy or colder outside, we would work indoors making use of the natural light for pretty portraits and nudes…

By Trond M. Skaret…

By Håkon Grønning…

Combined with breathtaking landscape this opportunity of neverending light is a photographer’s dream, especially that it makes the coveted ‘golden hour’ last for around 3 hours. Even if the day had been overcast, at 11.30 at night, the sun started glowing across the water and we with our confused bodyclocks and ‘staying-up-after-bedtime’ excitement, would head out to capture the magic…