Shooting in The Arctic Circle

I was in Rovaniemi, a town on the edge of Artic Circle in Finnish Lapland for two weeks on a business trip.  I always photograph my trips, but this time I wanted to do something different.  As well as photography I also want to produce a time lapse video.  With that in mind, I took my Olympus E-PL1 with me.  I decided I will only take the kit lens with me.  For video work, I much prefer the Pentax manual focus lenses, but for trip I took the kit lens and a table top tripod.  From my past experience the temperature at reach -35°C.  I know I do not want to change lens at that temperature.

Since the E-PL1 does not have an interval meter built in, I had to improvise.  What I did was to set the camera to continuous shooting mode, set the Anti Shock delay to 2s.  The anti shock function was designed to add a time delay between pressing the shutter button and actually taking a photo.  After setting up the camera as I want it, I use a rubber band to wrap around the shutter button and added a small coin to keep the button pressed.

Since the images were going to be imported into video editing software and the final video will be viewed on TV or computer, I set the image size to 16:9 ratio and shot at low resolution.  Once the start the camera shooting, I just left it to carry on until I got enough footage.

As well as time lapse images I also took quite a lot of video footage.  In the end, I had to edit most of them out, otherwise it will be an overlong video.  I used Sony Vegas HD 11 to produce my video and found it quite difficult to use.  It is a powerful piece of software and I will try to master it.  I am sure it will get easier with use.

I love the creativity of video and time lapse and definitely want to work on this much more in future.  The video I produced from my trip to Finland can be viewed on Vimeo.  I hope you like it.

As well and time lapse photography, I also took some panoramic images.  Here are a couple of examples of panoramic photos from this trip.

Frozen Lake near Rovaniemi

Ounusvaara Ski Slope Rovaniemi