In photography, you need a change of pace - a challenge. That's why I came up here to Lofoten in the north of Norway
You know, normally I work with big cameras and lots of lenses. It's just a backpack full of stuff,
but this time the challenge is completely different.
I want to shoot a story about Lofoten, its people in the landscape with only one camera and one lens.
The M5 and the 32mm 1.4
To get a feel for how people live and work in this landscape
I'm gonna be shooting for two days
with a tiny little island company who harvest wild seaweed to use in all sorts of cooking,
and I'm going to show you the almost limitless
flexibility of a fast, standard lens.
Hello.
I'm Richard. Angelita. Tamara. Nice to meet you.
Welcome to our little seaweed factory.
Thank you, so this is it.
This is it. It's a old, but it has a lot of charm.
Do you want to give me a little tour? Yes.
So, this is Canon's new 32mm 1.4. A 32mm sounds like an interesting number for a focal lens
but the reason why is it's an APS-C sensor, so if you compare that to a full-frame camera, it's almost a 50 millimeter lens
There is no distortion from a wide angle, there's no telephoto effect. The photo you take looks exactly like what you see.
To tell you the full story of Lofoten, I want to see them pulling the seaweed straight out of the ocean.
So we're heading into the active waters to find the highest quality of seaweed.
I want to see just what it takes to bring the crop from the fjords to our dinner plates.
This will be a good spot for you to do some harvesting. Cool.
And I want to shoot photos of Tamara and Angelita totally at home in the elements
When you're shooting with a prime it's a little bit like relearning your photography because you've gotta move more
you gotta walk more to get the perfect set up. You can't zoom.
If I had a zoom I would just sit there and get my shot, but it's not as good.
You know, the primes makes me connect better to my subject and that's a better photo. Of course, it's effort, but it's super rewarding.
So it's all about going a little back and forward, left and right, and really working with your angel until it's perfectly fine.
But now the Sun is up, so let's get the shot one more time.
Super nice.
You know, take on that challenge and really work your framing and work your subject and just dive one level deeper
Yeah, I think now it's time to get some straight forward portraits and now I'm gonna just focus straight on your eye
The magic of the 32 is what you can do with the aperture. It's 1.4. So it's a really fast lens.
In portraiture that's critical.
I really want to separate her from the background
that's why I open the aperture all the way, which creates a super shallow depth of field and that's what's gonna make the image really pop.
If you want to try this for yourself
just shoot a series staringt at f11. Get a couple of shots, then take the aperture to 4.5.
Take another one and then open all the way to 1.4 and you will see the 1.4. It's the most beautiful.
It's where the portrait really stands out.
When you shoot at 1.4. It's really critical that the focusing is just pitch perfect. The eye can be perfectly in focus
but the tip of the nose is out of focus. So make sure the focus is spot-on right on the eye.
The difference between shooting a portrait with a fast lens and your normal lens is enormous.
Once you've found it out for yourself the first time you will never want to go back.
When you learn how to control your depth of field your storytelling it's better because you can put emphasis in places in a photo
that you like
I'm trying to capture this scene,
so there's two ways. One way is, I really want to concentrate for example on Anja, then I would shoot an
open f-stop to really put a focus on her. If I want to tell a complete story of all three girls
then I use an f-stop 16 or 11 to get the biggest possible depth of field, so all three ladies are in focus.
With the tide rising, it's time to head back to civilization to see what you can do with all the seaweed.
We're off to Himmel & Havn where head chef and owner Frida has been a longtime collaborator
creating amazing new dishes from whatever they bring to her.
Hello. Yes, this is a seaweed we're cooking for you today. This we're gonna make spaghetti of. Yeah? And I made a seaweed salad and
some umami mix and some truffle seaweed.
Can't wait to try it. Thank you.
The secret in food photography is first of all, you know, look at this beautiful dish that Frida created for us.
So now it',s how can we bring it to a nice photograph?
Most important is the light source, and the light we have up here is it's flat and it looks boring.
Good light. It can be a lot of different things.
It can be a direct light source, an indirect light source, but this is a typical example of bad light.
So what I want to do is take it outside and find a nice spot with beautiful light to make justice to this nice food.
First of all, we have a nice light source. It's a warm light, you can always check that on your hand,
so that gives us a beautiful atmosphere around the picture.
Then what you want to do when you shoot the plate is find a nice and interesting perspective.
For this picture I choose looking down in an angle and to not go parallel to the lines to go in an angle
So one line ends in the corner of the image. That just gives it a little bit of excitement.
I'm in a restaurant
So I'm not always in control about the light situation.. Here it's a low light situation.
This lens is really good for low light. For example, the settings on this shot is 800 ISO
f-stop, 1.4 and shutter speed 200. If I compare it to a lens that has
4.0 as the starting aperture. It's a difference in the ISO from 800 to 6400
So picture is going to be much more crisp and sharp.
In this image, I really would like to work with the seaweed, so I want to get right in there.
The beauty about this lens is I can go super close. It's a little more than 20 centimeters.
It's not a macro, but it's really close enough for doing food photography.
This is so good.
By doing the surf and turf with the seaweed. It's great. I mean you can really taste that it's fresh.
Heya, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. I have a little surprise for you today. Okay, you ready? Yeah, I'm ready, let's go.
The sea is only half the story in Lofoten.
I've been dying to get up into the hills to take some amazing landscape photos.
And Angelita and Tamara have promised me a real treat
So where are we going?
Today I'm going to take you to one of mt favorite mountains.
It's quite steep, so I hope you're up for it.
And when you get to the top, it's an amazing view.
You can see where we harvest and I can show you all our secret spots.
Oh, that's good. It's perfect for the images. So yeah, I'm stoked to do a little hike.
Ready? Let's do it!
And enjoy the view, okay cool
Wow, what a beautiful home you have.
Really cool!
Where did we go yesterday? We harvest in this area, but yesterday we were all the way that way over there.
Over there? Yeah. Yeah, this is this is really amazing. Let's get some shots.
Shooting landscape you would traditionally pick a wide-angle lens, and that works, but it's not the only idea.
Lofoten has all these mountain ranges behind each other and a standard lens gives me a natural perspective
to bring that in one picture in an exciting world.
In landscape photography, it's all about the finest and smallest detail and that's you know, that's the quality of this lens
Even if something's very far away, if that's what you're going to put your focus
it's going to be pin sharp and you can see the smallest house or tree.
I'm trying to shoot a portrait of Angelita and Tamara showing this beautiful landscape in the background,
but to make it more exciting what you could do with the
32 millimeter lens is put something in the foreground and really put it out of focus. So I put the rock in the foreground
completely out of focus, open aperture, focus on the girls and it looks even more stunning.
Amazing, thank you very much! That's it.
Can't wait to see it. Check it out.
Wow, that's amazing.
I've been dreaming about coming to Lofoten for years.
On my journey, it was definitely the people and to see you know, what they do, the art of harvesting seaweed - that was beautiful to see.
To shoot that in this beautiful environment,
you know, that's a triple win.
What I loved about being on the journey is that I don't have to go,
you know, traveling with my big backpack and the heavy equipment. When you simplify it
it just makes room for something else and that was really nice to discover.
I'm not gonna get rid of
all my kit and all my lenses and the big variety, because every job needs a different tool.
But especially when I don't have a job this seems to be the perfect tool for me
because it feels so easy and so light, but still powerful enough to come home with a good story.