ANGELA B. PAN

Before leaving Geiranger, Andrew and I decided to go on a 30 minute hike. It wasn’t too far from the cabin where we were staying and an excellent way to get some physical activity in before we got back on the road to our next destination. What started off as just a normal hike along a mountain ended up being one of my favorite memories of the entire trip.

The beginning of the hike started off pretty flat, but that wasn’t going to last long. I could see about half a mile ahead of us, we were about to go up a little hill and turn the corner as soon as we got to the top. So we started our hike with that view just ahead of us. It hadn’t even been 10 minutes into when I saw two ears and a little head pop up from around the corner. OMG was that an alpaca? I turned around to Andrew to see if he saw what I was seeing and he was! Then all of the sudden 2 more heads popped up and I screamed “THERE’S EVEN MORE OF THEM!” I could not contain my excitement. I think in the end there was about 5 or 6 of them. I had my long lens on and captured a few images from a distance but immediately switched to my wide angle. There was no way I was not going to walk closer to them. Can you imagine see a group of alpacas with the Norwegian mountains and fjords as the backdrop? Holy crap my mind was blown.

The rest of the hike was great. More about that later but seriously these alpacas were so cool to see. I’m still smiling ear to ear just thinking about it.

My camera settings for this image is F4.0 at 1/3200th of a second at ISO 800 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

Be sure to hit the “purchase print” button when you hover over the image. Check out the sky and you see’ll all these little dots. At first I thought they were dust spots (knowing me and my camera) but upon further inspection, they’re all birds!!! How crazy is that! I attempted to try to get rid of them, but eventually I realized there were just way too many of them. Also, I thought it was pretty cool how you can barely see them but if you look deeper, you’ll realize the insane amount of birds that were circling these rocks. For someone who has a slight fear of birds, this whole situation was a little terrifying. Not only were there millions of birds who could have swooped down, lifted you up from off the ground and flown away with you, BUT these waves were extremely huge. I was trying my best to capture just how big they were with the person as scale, but it was pretty difficult. I think you have to be there to really see what I mean. It was like being on another planet with the the beautiful sea stacks, humongous waves and black sand beach.  This image makes me want to go back!

The settings for this image is F6.3 at 1/80th of a second at ISO 80. My main intention was to capture the large waves, but it was also to capture movement. The movement of the water in the foreground and the waves crashing but also the woman who unknowingly became my model. It was funny to watch her because she kept on walking towards the water but would run as fast as she could as soon as the wave crashed down. Its as if she was playing a game of chicken with the cold water.