Lofoten, in the slow hours
Winter light above the Arctic circle moves sideways, not down. A week of learning to shoot on its schedule.
At 68° north in February, the sun does not rise so much as graze. It climbs a few degrees above the southern horizon, tracks east to west for five or six hours, and then tips back down without ever having reached what would anywhere else be called noon. For a photographer, that is not a short day. It is an extended golden hour.
You stop thinking in terms of "morning" and "evening" and start thinking in directions — the light is coming from there, and it will get there by lunch.
The side-effect is that you shoot calmly. There is no panic about losing the good light, because the good light is the only light you are going to get, and it is staying for a while.
Cold, and what it costs
Batteries last about forty percent of their rated life in the air at −15°C. I keep two in an inner jacket pocket, rotating one onto the body and the other back to body heat every half hour. Condensation, when you come back inside, is the real danger — a camera sealed in a plastic bag for twenty minutes before you unzip your shell has saved me from trouble more than once.
What the trip was actually about
I came to Lofoten expecting to photograph the aurora and ended up photographing, almost entirely, the hours when there was no aurora — the blue minutes at 2pm, the ochre spread across a mountainside for forty uninterrupted minutes, the way a fishing village shifts in color as light passes behind it. The aurora showed up, eventually. It was smaller than the quiet.
If you are planning a trip: give yourself the slow days. The aurora is a bonus.