Last week I posted another poll to my story about which photo would be more interesting to hear the story behind. The result was very clearly the following photo:

To be honest, I kind of forgot I did not yet tell the story behind that photo on here, because it is one of my favorite photos I have ever taken. As well as one of my favorite travel photography stories to tell. So I won’t let you wait any longer, I’ll get started with the story behind this photo.

The situation

Okay, first some backstory. I was on holiday with my boyfriend. We went on a road trip to Sweden when I had only just gotten my driver’s licence (3 weeks before we left). I was very excited because I always wanted to go on a road trip, still want to try out van life, but that is a story for another time. We could borrow a car from family of my boyfriend and planned to camp in the wild. Which is allowed in Sweden, but proper research is required. We defintely did not do proper research and were lucky the first night, but not so much after that. We slept badly and the weather was not as good as we hoped either.

So after about a week we loved what we had seen, but decided to turn back. There was some good weather predicted in the south of the country and we decided to camp there for a couple of days before really going back. When my boyfriend woke up and got out of the tent really early one day (7:00) he urged me to get out of the tent too. Although he did not want to say why I should get up and out of the tent. I did it anyway and boy was it worth it.

The surroundings

When I got out of my tent, I could not believe my eyes. It was so foggy and there was amazing light. After taking some photos, my boyfriend decided to go for a swim and he went into the icy cold lake.

I enjoyed myself a lot during the surprisingly long time the circumstances kept up.

The settings

As per usual I used aperture priority mode to take this photo. That means that I set my aperture and the shutterspeed would be automatically calculated by the camera. The ISO was set on 100 because the light was quite abundantly present. I set the aperture to F/6.3 which usually is great for landscape photos in which you want to isolate a subject just a little from the scenery. The shutterspeed set by the camera was 1/800 seconds which shows how light the situation was.

The edit

My goal in editing this photo was to make the background trees disappear a bit more in the fog. Also I wanted to make the reflection look better, the colored bits coming through were annoying me and I wanted to make it black and white. Admittedly, I found that out during the editing process. Lastly, I centered Thomas in the photo.

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