Kelda Vikings

(About the title: it was the motto of Kodak, a manufacturer of argentic cameras, “clic clac” was the sound of the shutter when you took a picture)

You may know it (mostly because I have told you), but one of my main hobbies is photography. I would not qualify myself as a professional photographer, but rather as an amateur with a bit of experience.

My father was very interested in photography, and he always took a camera whenever we were leaving on vacation, and this is how I landed my hands on a camera for the first time. I thought it was fun to take pictures and then to show them to others.

When I was younger, my mother used to buy us, me and my brother, disposable cameras when we left for summer camps. They were not very sophisticated, but it was more than enough for a 9-year-old to register memories of a three-week camp. We used to send the best pictures to our grandparents, to show them how awesome was our stay, and to show them our new (sadly temporary) friends during the summer.

As I grew older, I could start to use my father’s camera, a Nikon D70, who was, at the time, one of the best performing DLSR from Nikon, and he came out relatively cheap, if you compared it to other reflexes of the same quality. And with it, he had three objectives: the regular one, sold with the body of the camera, a tele objective (with a focal 70-220, which corresponds to a zoom up to x7), and a wide-angle objective with which you cannot zoom, but distorts a bit the image (giving a “fish-eye” impression). I really enjoyed playing with the three objectives, but my father thought it was not very handy, and eventually, I ended up carrying the whole bag and taking all the pictures alone, and it was quite fun!

But at that time, I did know very few about photography, and I used to shoot all my pictures in full auto mode (which a lot of photographers consider a heresy, especially with a camera like the one I was carrying). And then, in 2010, I went to Canada. My father had since sold the big DSLR to opt for a small numeric camera from Panasonic, very light, and I had the right to take it with me in the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I was really impatient, because the landscapes in Canada are really beautiful (and in some places, look a bit like Norway!), and since I was in a camp working hand in hand with the Office of Forestry in Quebec, I would have the opportunity to take pictures of the wildlife! There, one of the organizers of the camp knew some things about photography, and he taught me how to make a better use of my camera, by using the manual mode. What’s the difference, you’ll ask? Huge.

To understand it, let’s make a small explanation on how the camera works. Basically, it is a series of mirrors, with at the end, a captor that collects the light from the source. This captor is hidden by a mirror, and this mirror guides the light towards the viewfinder of the camera through a prism (that flips the image so that we can see through the viewfinder). Before this mirror, there is a complex system of lenses, the objective, that allow the optical zoom, and there is a diaphragm, that controls the quantity of light going through it. Once we have all these pieces, we can talk about the three “biggest” parameters you play with a camera:

• The aperture of the diaphragm. This controls the depth of field of the photo: if you want to only have the object in the foreground to be sharp, and the rest of the field to be blurred, you’ll go for a small aperture. In contrary, if you want to have all of your photo to be sharp, you have to choose a great aperture. The second thing the aperture decides is the brightness of the photograph: a small aperture will make a bright photograph; a great aperture will make for a darker one.
• The shutter speed. When you press the button on your camera, you won’t see anything through the viewfinder for a fraction of a second (on DSLR only). During this moment, the mirror in front of the captor will rise, letting light reach it, and actually taking the picture. The time the mirror is risen is the shutter speed. It mainly influences the brightness of the photograph: with small speeds, you’ll have bright photograph, but if you are shooting a moving target, you may as well get motion blur, so you have to take care! Higher speeds will make for darker pictures.
• The sensibility of the captor. This also decides the brightness of the pictures (it is defined in ISO numbers, usually going in a scale of powers of 2). The higher the number, the brighter the picture, but it can lead to noise if the captor is not well-factored.

When you take a picture in full auto-mode, the camera takes the point it uses to make the auto-focus and sets it as the “point zero” for the brightness, and plays with all the parameters above to make it so this point is at a certain level of luminosity. It is easy, but not very pleasing: you are not really taking the picture, you are telling your camera to do so. So, in Canada, I started to play with these different parameters… and often messing them up, ending up in too bright or too dark, or even blurred photographs. But I had lots of fun taking them and that is what’s important.

After some time, I lost interest in photography, and I started my preparatory classes, so I didn’t really have time for hobbies. And I entered Mines ParisTech. There, we have an association dedicated to covering the events of our student’s life, and they have some gear to do it: a DSLR, two other video cameras and a GoPro. Little by little, I came back to taking pictures, and my father had bought a newer camera, a bridge (a hybrid between a numeric camera and a DSLR: it works the same as a DSLR, but there is no mirror nor prism, light reaches directly the captor and you have a live view in the viewfinder, like a video camera) from Sony. So, I took it with me in French Guyana last February, and I found back the feelings I had in Canada, but now with a bit more experience and knowledge. And I also started to use a software to edit my pictures. It seems strange at first, but taking the pictures with the right settings is approximately 75% of the work. When the picture is saved in your SD card, it is using the parameters of the captor, on which you have little to no margin of maneuver. So, treating the picture after taking it is a way to have this margin. And it can also make for some of the mistakes you made when taking the picture (too bright, too dark, wrong framing, …)!

And after this, I use my trips all around Europe (Vienna, Saint-Petersburg, Amsterdam, Brussels and finally Norway) to take lots and lots of pictures (I have approximately 50 GB of pictures in my laptop currently!). When I knew I was going to Norway, I started to look if I could not by my own DSLR and give back his camera to my father (since le last time he saw it was 6 months before!). And I finally got my hands on a Nikon D7200, which is a midrange DSLR, good for experienced amateurs, but not a pro camera (since the price gap is nearly 1000$ from midrange to pro cameras). With it, rather than taking the Nikon objective sold with it (who suffer from design problems and have a lot of distortion and sometime chromatic aberration), I opted for an objective from Tamron, 24-70mm (x3 zoom), and most importantly, with a constant aperture (when you zoom, the minimum aperture of an objective tends to increase mechanically, it requires a special type of mechanism to allow a constant aperture, whichever focal length you use, and it becomes possible to make macro-photography – taking pictures of small things with a lot of detail) On top of it, I put a polarizing filter, to be able to decide whether or not the reflection on water of windows appear in the picture.

That’s it for the historic/technic part. Now, for the reasons I like photography. It really struck me when I first was in Guyana, but when I go in a foreign country, I like to see and to understand how people live there, what they are experiencing in their everyday life, what is their environment and what do they see. And this I what I try to express through the pictures I take: to capture a moment, an emotion of everyday life in the city I’m in, or simply, something I saw in a glimpse and that I find funny or interesting. For these reasons, I take very rarely pictures of monuments: a lot of people have taken pictures of them, that are surely better than the one I would have taken. But I’m sure that nobody took the picture of the snack seller right next to it, who is currently cooking, with the steam nearly hiding him.

When it comes to taking pictures of people, I really prefer them not to look at the camera. The posture we adapt when we know we’re being photographed is not natural at all: the smiles are (a bit) forced, we feel a bit ill-at-ease, whereas if I do not tell people they’re being photographed, I can capture something much more natural, ending up in a better picture.

Finally, I find that photography is something really particular, and I requires training, and even with training, few of the pictures I take are worth being saved : in Copenhagen, I took 1793 pictures in my whole 3-day trip (you read the figure well), and among them, I kept 26 that sum up what I felt in the city. And I the end, I find more and more that it changes the way I look at things, at people, cities, landscapes, always looking for the small details, the things you do not see at the first glimpse. And this is what I find cool!

If you want to get a sample of some of my pictures, you can go > HERE <

On Saturday, July, 22nd, Pierre-Étienne, Thomas, Yoënn and I decided to to go on a hike in Skorve, near Seljord. The site visittelemark.no promoted a “challenging hike” with “great views” and the possibility to see a plane wreck from the 2nd World War. A great day in perspective.

On the 21st of July, I came and picked up the keys to our rental car in the Hertz concession, in Hovensgata : a silver grey Golf, all equipped, perfect to guide us to our destination. On the Saturday morning, we all gathered in the parking of the Rema in Hovenga Center at 10 AM, joined by Matthieu, one of our friends currently doing his internship in Oslo. After shopping what we needed for lunch, we headed right to Seljord, at approximately 95 km Northwest from Porsgrunn. In the car, the playlist was playing some rock while we were discussing of how our internships were going and remembering the mess that was our residence back in Paris.

After 1 hour and 30 minutes of driving, we finally see Seljord, boarding the Seljordvatn, a huge lake. The water was very still, giving the impression of a mirror in which the landscape was reflecting. We entered the town and started to head towards the beginning of the hiking trail, following a very narrow road in the forest, to finally stop in a small parking lot. After we took our bags, we finally started the hike.

The beginning of the trail was extremely steep, consisting in a trail of sand and gravel going uphill for approximately 700 meters, changing after this in a small trail in a forest area. After one hour of walking, we arrived in a small glade where with a small house – a shelter for hikers that wanted to camp here. We decided to eat there (it was already 13:30 and we were famished !). At the menu : bread, egg salad, meat, some crisps and as a dessert, bananas (a regular lunch at Kelda !).

We continued our way uphill through a very small path, with few indications. Every 100 meters, a red mark reminded us that we were on the right way up. We stopped several times to enjoy the view on the Seljordvatn, which is absolutely stunning from the heights, and we kept on walking until a crossroads. We had the choice : on the left, we could go and see the “Flyvrak”, the plane wreck, but it was only a one-way path and we had to turn our back once arrived there, and on the right the path to the tip of the Goysen, the highest mountain of the area, at 1370 m. After a small consultation, we decided to head to the Flyvrak – it was still early in the afternoon, and we would decide what to do next.

The path to the Flyvrak was not very steep, and we could enjoy the landscape, which was made of plains with some small ponds and streams. After half an hour, we started to spot several pieces of the plane, and finally, the small plate commemorating the event, right next to the plane wreck. We had to chose what to do next : either we could turn our backs and go to the Goysen, or, like the adventurers we are, we could go off the paths and try to join back the trail later, exploring the area.

As true Kelda Vikings, that is what we decided to do, and we started to climb uphill to see what the area had to offer. We climbed, we stopped to enjoy the view, we kept on climbing, and at some moment, the vegetation became sparser and we arrived in a rocky environment, meaning we were closer to the heights. After a last part of “climbing”, we finally see the altitude lakes that we saw on the pictures of the hike : good news ! And finally, the red marks, that we lost quite some time ago, showing us which way to go. We start to follow the trail, enjoying the sun, that finally decided to show up. After an hour or so, we saw a small path going to the top of the Nordnibba, one of the peaks of the trail. Since it started to become late, and we wanted to finish the circuit, we decided to keep on walking and not go on top of it.

At this moment, we lost (once again) the trail, and we started going downhill, trying to find back the path, but unsuccessfully. After some time we ended up quite down the mountains, without finding back the trail. We saw something that looked like a path, on the other side of the valley, quite far from where we were – and where we parked the car, so we decided to climb back the mountain to join back the beginning of the trail. And it was here that things became a bit tricky : we were far from the trail (actually we didn’t see anything that looked like it from where we were), on the mountainside, which was quite steep. Yoënn went first scouting to see if we could find a path that was passable. The one he found was “okay-ish” (on his own words), and with Thomas and Matthieu, we decided to climb uphill to find another way around the mountain. At some point, we lost contact with Thomas and Pierre-Étienne (who decided to follow Yoënn), and with Matthieu, we climbed straightforward to the top, to get a better view of our comrades. After half an hour of steep climbing, we reached the top of the mountain, where we could see Yoënn and Thomas, waiting for us in the distance, quite below where we were, and Pierre-Étienne, who was below them and trying to climb back. We shouted at them, Thomas and Yoënn saw us, but not Pierre-Étienne, deafened by the wind and the echo. After some time, we lost eye contact with him, and kept on trying to join Thomas and Yoënn, who were sitting on rocks, near a small path.

When we finally joined them, we still had to find Pierre-Étienne, who was nowhere to be seen. Yoënn turn back on his steps to see if he was stuck downhill while Thomas, Matthieu and I were shouting his name to see if he was not further on the trail. After half an hour of searching, we finally found him, waiting for us not far from one of the lakes we previously saw. After everybody gathered, we understood that we were back exactly where we were three hours earlier, and we decided to climb down the mountain, to the parking lot. Near the plane wreck, we ate some raspberry cake to get our forces back and finally, finished the hike to get back to the rental car, waiting for us where we left it.

Then, we headed straight to Porsgrunn, the car was quiet, everybody was resting from the day, and we could enjoy the view of the warm color of the sunset on the Seljordvatn and the cliffs around it, as we left Seljord.

Back to Porsgrunn, we ordered some pizza and ate it near the river, not far from Pierre-Étienne’s, gave back the keys of the rental, and headed straight to our beds, tired after this long day.

To sum up, the trail was approximately 14 kilometers long and meant to be done in 7 hours, 8 if we took our time. It took us nearly 9 hours, we did about half of it, but we enjoyed some great views of the valleys of Seljord, and we blazed our own trail, as true Kelda Vikings !