Arctic Norway — Part 3: A Waterfall Hike in Rago National Park
- 23 hours ago
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This is the third and final chapter of my solo road trip through Arctic Norway — and if you followed Part 1 and Part 2, you already know the weather had its own ideas. By this point I'd driven to a new stretch of coastline, and the forecast was, once again, relentless rain. So I did the only sensible thing: I leaned into it.
Chasing light on the coast
I started to spent driving the coast and stopping wherever a burst of light broke through — long exposure, black and white, because it suits these conditions better than anything else. This wasn't about grand, epic sunset light. It was a quieter exercise: simplifying the scene, placing shapes carefully in the frame, and playing the brightness of reflected light on the sea against the darkness of the sky to make those shapes come out. Honestly, some of those abstract seascapes are images I'm really happy with.
Not far from where I was staying, a small trail led me to the smallest lighthouse I've ever seen — a little red structure perched on a cliff, with massive mountains stacked behind it. I framed it, dropped on an ND1000 for a long exposure et voilà! Everything else in that scene is so muted that the red really stands out.
The hardest part of landscape photography
Then came the rain. Two days of it, pouring constantly, with nothing to do but drive around and shoot from the car. I'll be honest: it put a real dent in my motivation. And that's the thing I keep coming back to : the hardest part of landscape photography isn't the technique or the gear. It's finding the will to get out the door when it looks completely hopeless. I know I'm not alone in that. But that's exactly where the best shots tend to hide, which makes it both the most difficult and the most important habit to keep.
The hike into Rago National Park
So I forced myself out, and hiked into Rago National Park toward a river view and a waterfall I'd seen online. The climb was tough on legs but the second I reached the viewpoint, every bit of it paid off. An altitude lake sits up there like a perfect mirror, then drops straight off a rock face into a massive waterfall, with a meandering river leading the eye out toward the sea. The flow of it tells a whole story: lake to waterfall, to river, to ocean. Afterwards I walked down and around the lake for a few more frames.
That's the end of the Norway series. From here it was a drive to Tromsø and on to the Lofoten for some slower, more touristy days with my girlfriend, so if there's a slideshow waiting at the end of the video, that's where it came from!
Thanks for following along to the end!
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