If you don't bring some kind of camera with you to Norway, you will feel quite the fool when you get there. Norway is as rich an environment for photography as you will find anywhere on earth.
Still, in bringing a camera to Norway — whether it's a digital or 35mm SLR, a camcorder, or maybe even a film movie camera — you will face a bit of a challenge. Why? Because in framing an image you will inevitably feel you are leaving out something marvelous. Often there is much more to work with than the camera's field of view can possibly accommodate.
I take a lot of pictures and isolate on parts of the scene at a time. It won't capture anything like the 360° panorama surrounding you as you stand there. But nothing will truly substitute for that — which after all is why you need to go to Norway yourself rather than just look at pictures.
In the summer months in the north, above the Arctic circle, you can delight in 24 hours a day of sunlit conditions for photography. Even below the arctic circle, the days can be quite long in the summer. This is a huge productivity advantage to an outdoor photographer. Many times I have gone out to shoot in full sunlight when everyone else is asleep.
Depending on exactly where you visit and when you do so, the arctic summer sun may remain in sight in the sky all night, or may set behind a mountain for some time when it comes close to the horizon.
I've spent a lot of summer days in Tennskjer, a small village on the fjord Malangen. Late at night here in summer, the sun can be seen to duck down below the island of Kvaløya for a short time, then reappear shortly thereafter. This period late at night makes for fine photography conditions — an extended twilight period consisting of a sunset immediately followed by a sunrise, with no darkness in between.
Whereas the summer's Midnight Sun provides an outdoor photographer's paradise, arguably the opposite situation holds true in winter. In the arctic during winter, the days grow shorter and shorter until finally there is little or nothing left of the day. Without much sun, photography outdoors is certainly more challenging. If you want to capture snowy scenes in Norway, March and April may be better times, when you can still expect snow but will have a more normal length day to work within.
You can expect a diverse array of great photographic, video, or film subjects outdoors in Norway, and I will touch on only the most obvious examples here.
There are beautiful mountains, fjords, waterfalls and rivers across the entire country.
There are many opportunities to photograph ships and boats, many of them wooden craft of designs you aren't likely to see outside of Scandinavia.
Norwegian animals provide excellent photographic subjects, such as reindeer, foxes, deer, and elk, diverse birds, as well as the farm sheep and cows that roam freely in the mountains during the summer.
Such sheep, by the way, like salt mixed with flour as a snack, and they may follow you around for quite some while if you give them some. In fact, they are likely to follow you around even if you don't give them some, in the hope that you will. It certainly makes them easy to photograph.
Don't pack your camera away when flying in Norway. The countryside looks phenomenal from the air, and you should take advantage of the opportunity to capture some aerial photos. But you will need a window seat to do it, so think ahead.
These days I am using a Canon HV20 HD camcorder most of the time when I travel in Norway, which can take both HD video and still photos. More and more of my subjects today are animals, especially birds, and I find I am much more satisfied with my results filming them rather than photographing them. Bring whatever camera gear fits your subject, budget, skills, and preference.
If you leave some critical photographic gear behind, break something, or need a battery, a camcorder tape, or some film, you certainly can find what you need in any major Norwegian town.
But I strongly advise you to plan ahead and bring what you need with you to Norway to the greatest extent possible. In my experience, camera equipment and accessories are far more expensive in Norway than in stores I frequent in the USA. When in Norway I greatly prefer to spend my money on the things I just cannot get at home.
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