Northern Lights Revisited
- Mike Page
- Mar 15
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 20
There's a thrill that you get from visiting a new location as a photographer for the first time: What am I going to find? Which compositions are waiting for me around the next corner? How does the light work here? It's all fun to discover. Will this composition that I've planned or perhaps seen on Instagram work well for me? Everything's fresh and sometimes you can come away with some great images. But it's often not until the second or third time that I visit a location that I start coming away with images that I'm really happy with. By then I've got the lie of the land and a pocketfull of compositions that I can turn to when the right conditions materialise. I also know which compositions categorically don't work and can save time by avoiding them.
So it was that we headed back to southern Norway for our third visit since 2020. Sharon and I try to get away for a week's winter sports every year, with our sport of choice being cross-country skiing. The last two years we'd been up on the Seiser Alm in the Dolomites, in 2025 we were headed back to Skeikampen in the Gausdal region of Norway, about 3 h north of Oslo. Friends from university days have a cabin up in the hills there and graciously let us use it every now and then. Normally this means that we head there together, which is extremely convenient for us as it cuts out transport and accomodation costs.
Photography in Norway is fundamentally different to photography in the Alps or the UK. For starters the sun is lower due to the latitude, regardless of the time of year. Not even John o' Groats comes close. Then the lie of the land is very different. The sky is BIG in Norway. In the Alps you've often got steep sided valleys and powerful rock formations dominating the landscape. Even in Britain the mountains are bigger, at least than the ones of Gausdal, which tend to be big and rolling. The landscape makes you feel smaller somehow, perhaps because you can see further and the distances just look big.
In the MA course that I'm presently enrolled in (AUB Bornemouth, I would definitely recommend it if you want to make more of your photography), we've spent a lot of time in the first three modules trying to define ourselves as photographers and identify our niches. I'm starting to understand my role as a photographer much better. A lot of it has to do with our mountaineering. There are a lot of photographers out and about, even in the landscape, and there are a lot of mountaineers and cross country skiers. But there aren't that many that do both.
Although we saw a lot of people out skiing, I didn't see a single camera apart from my trusty Olympus all week. The extreme conditions can be a little hostile to cameras, so I'd definitely recommend making sure that whatever you take with you to places like this is weather sealed, and I know that my OM-1 can handle it. Although my Nikon Z7 II is supposed to be resiliant, the IP53 rating of my Olympus is supposed to be top in class
Apropros weather, our 2025 visit here was the mildest yet. In 2020 our maximum midday temperature for the whole week was -10°C and we were regularly getting -20°C overnight. Add to that a wicked wind over the Fjells and it was seriously cold. On one of our last days we skied over to Fagerhoi, a 30 km round trip. Taking my softshell off in the cafe at lunchtime I had ice on the inside of my coat where my sweat had frozen. If at any point any of us had had a fall, I hate to think what our body temperatures would have been by the time any rescue had got to us.
This time the temperature hovered between -5°C and 0°C for the whole week and remarkably we had very little wind. We had a lot of mist and a little bit of snow at the beginning of the week and then a couple of really fine days where we made the most of the blue skies to hit Fagerhoi and Prestkampen. The mist reduced the landscape to a monochrome environment where you became sensitive to, almost hungry for, every drop of colour you came across, such as the peachy tones on the silver birch below. This is definitely going to go into my print bin (photos that I will print at some point in the near future, not photos I intend to chuck out).
Of all of the mountain sports that we do, I think that cross-country skiing is my favourite. It's definitely my zen sport; my happy place. Once I get into the rhythm my mind frees up and I can have long interrupted conversations with myself or just think about nothing at all with none of the digital distractions that would otherwise disturb my peace. The landscape in Norway certainly helps here as well. Skeikampen is about 800 m above sea level and is just below the tree line. Consequently the tours from the ski centre are either through snow-laden forest or up on the gently rounded hills.
What stood out more than anything else for me on this visit was the amount of snow on the trees. Even in the cold trip here in 2020 the trees were bare, unless there had been a hoarfrost the night before. I suspect that this was a factor of the wind rather than a direct lack of snow (in fact I remember having to climb onto the cabin roof to shovel the stuff off while we were there).
The picture in the forest was much as you'd anticipate with some interesting patterns. All very Narnia-esque. Up on the fells, however, the snow combined with the wind led to some bizarre snow sculptures on the isolated trees. I think the wind must have been blowing from left to right in the image below to generate these patterns and the snow must have started quite wet and then become very cold very quickly in order for structures like this to develop.
We also encountered our first ice-bow as we emerged from the mist - you can see the corner of it on the left-hand side of the image below. The sun had cleared over the mist behind us and there was another mist-bank ahead. The result is a semicircle of very faintly coloured ice crystals.
Over the course of the week we clocked up nearly 130 km of skiing. Even our hosts had rarely recorded that much over seven days. Starting slowly at around 15 km runs we ramped it up when the weather improved and we could enjoy the views on the trek over to Fagerhoi and then over Prestkampen.
Extended Gallery
Fires in the Sky
The most colour we saw all week was actually in the sky. Wednesday evening pressaged clearer skies for the next day and then Thursday we even caught a glimple of the northern lights. Nothing like the display we had in 2022 but still worth donning our outdoor gear to head out into the night.
So thanks again to our wonderful hosts Catrin and Pete. We will definitely be darkening your doorstep again for a future ski week. Maybe next time I'll even learn that I really need to throttle the exposure to avoid blowing out the lights on Skeikampen mountain.
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