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Norwegian Gathering Report |
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Contributed by Ole Tjugen
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Wednesday, 07 December 2005 |
In late September, LF and ULF users from all over gathered in a remote village in Norway for a long weekend of LF photography.
It all started with a light comment - "maybe we should meet up somewhere" between myself and another Norwegian LF'er. Maybe it would have ended there, if that comment hadn't been made in English, on an international forum? Anyway the reaction was immediate, and we realised that this was going to turn into an international event - so we'd better start planning!
Choosing a place in Norway for photography is not easy. Choosing a place for photography in late autumn is a little easier, as it eliminates the darkest places (most of the north), the wettest places (most of the west coast), and the coldest places (most of the inland). I finally chose Loen for several reasons: It's near enough to the coast to have a mild climate. It's inland enough to have a drier climate than the coast, and it's far enough south that the light (if any) would be good. The area also has some of the most dramatic landscape of anywhere on the planet.
There's an added advantage of that village having more guest beds (relative to the population) than just about any other place in Norway. It's out of the way, and not really easy to get to. But I let that be outweighed by the fact that I know the area well, and spend as much time as I can with my relatives there. At the time of the gathering most of the tourists would have gone, so there should be no problems finding (discounted) accomodation.
I was still thinking of this as a "workshop", but decided to let that idea go and call it a "gathering" instead. A workshop needs a certain degree of firm structure, which I honestly didn't feel up to. With a "gathering" we could go straight to the part I like best - put a number of LF photographers in the field somewhere, and see what happens. Someone is bound to learn something, and I trusted the nature to impress even those who didn't learn anything new. I had a backup-plan in case of torrential rain, but was fortunately able to save that for a later occasion.
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Norwegian roads are "interesting", and I'm sure some of the international participants would use stronger words than that. But we all did manage to arrive, even with most of the fenders and wing mirrors intact. Fortunately it was raining almost all the way from Bergen (or Haugesund, twice as far away but cheaper flights), so everyone still had some film left on arrival.
And then the weather turned out nice... Really nice, even! Blue sky with decorative dots of cloud, the dozens of waterfalls looked great from all the recent rainfall, vegetation lush and green - just beginning to turn colours, the lake as green as ever!
So all I had to do was point the participants up the valley (interesting road), up a side valley (even more interesting) or in to the end of the valley where some people found out it was possible to get past the point whee the road had been damaged by rockfall (very, very, VERY interesting) and all the way in to the glacier. The evenings were filled with dinner, discussion, sampling the imported goods, and impromptu attempts at teaching. My suitcase-full of lenses were a useful teaching aid :)
I have no idea how many sheets of film were exposed in those few days, but I still haven't finished developing all of mine. Tedd Soost's 12x20" Wisner was the largest camera, my Voigtländer VAG 6.5x9cm the smallest. I brought a 30x40cm Russian camera as well, and 18x24cm, 5x7", 4x5" and a couple of 9x12cm ones...
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 10 December 2005 )
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