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After many days of dark weather we were getting glimpses of beautiful sunshine towards the end of our visit to the Faroe Islands. It may well be a case of the isles saving the best for last for us. What was also great about it was that we did not just get totally blue skies all of the sudden. We had wonderful clouds around with sunlight breaking through and creating nice dappled light effect on the landscape. There was a little bit of rain still passing through and that also added to the atmosphere. In some moments we were able to experience it all, including the already well described strong gusty winds, just about at the same time. One of these moments was on this beautiful winding Norðradalsvegur road on Streymoy. It descends to the village of Norðradalur and a small island of Koltur can be seen in the distance.
I would have liked to photograph this location at sunset but since that was not possible I was hoping for some favourable light conditions when we drove out there during the day. Luckily we got some great conditions which I was very excited about. The aforementioned combination of weather factors created beautiful light and that light was further enhanced because in October the sun did not rise very high over the horizon throughout the day. That meant that the sunlight was not overly harsh and it had a lovely soft glow to it.
Photographing this scene presented a challenge because I was shooting against the direction of the sun and there was quite a big tonal difference between the very bright sky and the landscape. I had to shoot bracketed exposures to cover the entire dynamic range and blend them together later on in post processing. It took a bit of time and progression of subtle adjustments to get the image looking as I wanted it to. The main objective was to retain detail and atmosphere in the sky without pushing it too far and taking the attention away from the road. I hope I was able to achieve that and I am very pleased with the way the final image turned out. It reflects the moment as I saw and felt it at the time.
As the road took its downward path there were a number of different spots where we stopped and I was able to evaluate compositional possibilities. We drove all the way down to the village (which is hidden below by the cliffs on the right) and then came back up again to pick the right spot for this photo. In the end, it was hard to go past this twisty part of the road with its ribbon like flow. There also was fantastic light shining through on the different sections of the road which gave the scene extra dimension in my eyes.
I hope you enjoy this "twisted" take on a classic road photo composition and find the surrounding landscape and conditions as beautiful as we found them during our visit.
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This image has been featured in 1 Remix collection.