The Faroe Islands

For some years I've had an ambition to go to the Faroe Islands. There's something about their remoteness, lurking often unnoticed halfway between Scotland and Iceland, and their rugged beauty, which has exerted a powerful attraction. During my research earlier this year, I found out that the islands have the highest proportion of football spectators per capita in the world. This clearly needed further investigation, so I arranged a week long trip to document the Faroes football scene, more of which in a subsequent post.Whilst there, it is impossible not to be drawn to the amazing landscape. Sheer basalt cliffs rising vertically from the ocean into the clouds 800m above. Crazily angled islands. Mountains covered in waterfalls. Crashing waves. I found it hard to concentrate on my football pictures and interviews, and admit to being sidetracked in the most pleasurable fashion to do some landscape photography. So this post has nothing to do with sport and everything to do with landscape and location, plus quite a bit about kit.Getting to the Faroe Islands was particularly easy, with a 2 hour 15 min flight from Gatwick via the very friendly Atlantic Airways. I'd pre-booked a cheap & cheerful hire car from Unicar, and picked up my 140,000km Golf estate (perfect for me) from 20m outside the airport door after clearing passport control and collecting my bags in about 15 minutes. Bliss after the package holiday chaos of Gatwick.I was carrying all my usual sports gear comprising 2x Canon 1D bodies, 17-40, 24 and 70-200 lenses, 1.4 extender, flash and other bits, in fact everything other than my 400 2.8 which was too big & heavy to take. Suspecting that I'd be doing some landscape photography, I had my tripod, some Lee filters, polariser etc. All went into a Lowepro Vertex 200 rucksack which weighed in at 12kg breaching the hand luggage regs.In addition, I had a very cute Olympus OM-D EM-5 with me, and my set of micro four-thirds lenses comprising an 8mm fisheye, 9-18m, 14mm, 20mm and 45mm mixture of Panasonic and Olympus kit. My plan was to try out the OM-D alongside my Canon 1D Mark IV to see how capable it was. This kit all went into a small Think Tank Speed Changer belt bag and weighed virtually nothing.As my first football related activity was not until day 2, I immediately headed out to the village of Gásadalur which is on the same island as the airport to take the first shot in this post. A more picturesque location would be hard to imagine. There's a whole blog post in just this single shot from Gásadalur, which was precarious and felt extremely dangerous at the time, being perched on a 100m cliff edge on some uneven, crumbling stairs with strong blustering winds, but I'll save that for another time. My plan was to shoot the same shot with the Canon 1D and the Olympus OM-D and come to some conclusions about the performance of the OM-D.So onto the Olympus OM-D. Whilst the complexity and setup and number of options on the OM-D rivals the Canon, once you get your head around it I was able to get the camera set how I wanted it using RAW and superfine JPEG, and numerous other settings. I was able to store the settings in a "MySet" so the camera would remember them and I could carry on without worrying about further fiddling of the complex settings to reconfigure it.The next thing that seriously impressed me was the "live bulb" setting on the OM-D. For long exposure landscape shots that I do, getting the exposure right with an 10-stop neutral density (ND), polariser and graduated ND filter can be extremely difficult, with complex calculations or, in my case, trial and error. With the live bulb setting and a cable shutter release locked into bulb mode, as the exposure progresses the image is shown on the camera's rear screen and updated every few seconds. When the exposure is right, you close the shutter. Amazing, simple and brilliant!As I went through the first day's pictures that evening, I was very impressed by the shots from the OM-D. The Olympus 9-18 lens performed beautifully against the Canon 17-40. The level of detail and sharpness the OM-D produced was so close to the Canon 1D IV that it was indistinguishable except on extremely close pixel-level inspection, where the Canon showed slightly better fine rendering of small details. Now I'm in no way a professional camera reviewer, and I'm not into the intricate technicalities of MTF charts and so on. But to my eye, for all intents and purposed the OM-D files were easily on a par with those of the 1D IV.The result is that, from day 2 onwards, I barely used the Canon except for football action pictures and some portrait photoshoots where I needed wireless flash and hadn't yet figured out the flash settings on the Olympus. The OM-D was my continuous companion, sitting around my neck with all the lenses and Lee filters in the belt pack. The freedom this gives for walking, climbing, scrambling down cliffs and just simply reducing the weight I had to carry is fantastic. Not having to get a backpack off to rummage around and find a lens just makes the whole shooting experience much more satisfying.So, all the pictures in this post and in the slideshow at the end of the post are taken with the OM-D.Getting around the Faroes is simplicity itself. The road network is very good, with pretty clear signage. It's not a big place, and you can drive from the airport in Vagar (south westerly tip) to Viðareiði in the north east corner in about an hour and 30 minutes if you go steady. There are bridges across the smaller gaps between the islands, and undersea tunnels under the bigger gaps. Even small villages are reachable by tunnels straight through the mountains, many of them being single track with passing places. You can find all sorts of useful information on Wikipedia.I was planning to sleep in the car for a few nights, but chickened out and stayed in hotels instead. The Airport Hotel is adequate, nothing to write home about but a good base for exploring Vagar, and I also stayed in the Hotel Hafnia in the capital city Tórshavn which had good breakfasts and a decent enough single room for me, and the rather intriguing Hotel Klaksvik on the island of Borðoy in the north-east corner. The Hotel Klaksvik is/was a seaman's lodge so, whilst being very clean and tidy, with comfy en-suite rooms, it's somewhat plain. Very helpful people throughout though, with excellent English spoken by everybody.These locations gave me the ability to cover a big percentage of the islands. Due to the long days, the sun sets late (11pm) and rises early (3am), and you get a very long period of twilight which, should it not be overcast which it is most of the time, is completely beautiful. I also managed to get a helicopter ride to & from the island of Mykines in the very south west which is completely and totally stunning and highly recommended.Being able to travel light is a real joy, and another thing that significantly helped that is the 5-axis image stabilisation built into the body of the OM-D. This is very effective indeed, and enabled me to leave the tripod in the car. For example the image above is pin sharp and taken with a shutter speed of 1/15th of a second, handheld. Used in video mode, the IS is spookily effective - rather like having a steadicam on the camera as it smooths out jiggles and twitches creating very professional-looking video without a tripod. It's even cooler with a Pico Dolly for tracking shots which I had in my kit.Prior to setting off on the trip, I realised that my 14mm (28mm equivalent) micro four-thirds lens was not wide enough for landscape work. Using some adept bargaining techniques I picked up an Olympus 9-18 lens second hand. Again, I was very impressed with this lens, being sharp and clear, and beautifully wide at 9mm. Though it's a tad slow aperture-wise, that's no problem for landscape work so in my view it's the ideal micro four-thirds landscape lens, especially considering that it can take filters which the Panasonic 7-14 cannot. It became my most-used lens, and with the 8mm fisheye for getting w-i-d-e shots and the 45 1.8 I had a very good setup. I barely used the 20 1.7 and 14 2.5 primes.I also found that I was using the electronic viewfinder on the Olympus for all shots other than those on a tripod. It seems very natural to use it that way. I had no problems with the EVF whatsoever. Refresh rate seems good, you can see what you're getting, and you can configure the image review time as well so once you take the shot you can look at the resulting picture in the viewfinder immediately. A very nice touch is that you can display the blown highlights or black lowlights in the EVF and on the rear screen as well, so it's obvious if you've got areas of over or underexposure as you get big flashing red or blue in those areas.The multiple viewfinder/display options are quite complex though, and I often found myself in a display option I hadn't realised I'd selected, wondering why my highlights weren't displaying, or where my horizontal & vertical level indicators had gone. There seem to be too many options to have to figure out.Aside from confusion about the information shown on the display, I got on very well with the OM-D. From wide landscapes on the top of mountains to being behind the goal as a remote radio triggered camera at a couple of football matches I photographed, it performed brilliantly. In fact, I liked it so much I've bought another one. I've now got a 2-body setup for my professional work which I intend to use for lots of the non-sport jobs that I do. I can also now put two remotes behind the goal at football matches to stand a better chance of getting those very elusive shots that look so good when they are nailed right. The 1D's aren't being consigned to the bin by the way - they remain the core of my sports gear and the OM-D's will supplement them as & when.

Aside from all the camera talk, if you enjoy travel, enjoy photography, and enjoy amazing places, get yourself to the Faroes. I'd love to go back in the winter when the storms are blowing - that would be a brilliant experience.

Here's the slide show below. Full screen looks cool!

Faroe Islands Monochrome - Images by SLIK Images Sports Photography using an Olympus OM-D