I can’t stop taking scenery pictures. When a vista opens up before me, when the sky clears out crystal-blue, when birch trees turning yellow catch the light, I my phone emerges from my pocket. I say to myself, remember this moment, and I snap a picture.
Hundreds of these landscapes appear on my phone. I am walking down the hill to work. I sneak in a quick evening hike before the sun goes down. I am photographing the scenery. My husband and I have a shared photo library into which any new image either of us takes automatically loads. “More scenery pictures,” he jokes to me. But I keep going. I find a landscape just too beautiful.
Last week, with a couple of days off from school, we took the chance to drive up the coast to Ålesund, a five and a half hour drive north through the fjords and mountains. We had passed through Ålesund once before five years ago but had seen very little. From car and ferry on the drive up, I kept my camera snapping images.
The west coast of Norway is studded with islands. As if land and water here found every possible way they could enmesh, the fjords bring ocean water deep into the interior, and islands dot the coast so that at the edge of the mainland, you look out to see island after island. In many places, three or four layers of islands lay between the mainland coast and open sea. Ålesund is built on a cluster of these islands that rings the mouth of a deep fjord.
Ålesund is considered one of the most beautiful cities in Norway. When it burnt to the ground in a terrible fire in the winter of 1904, residents rebuilt in the Art Nouveau style with gables and turrets. Buildings crowd the central island, in some places being built right over the water on concrete pillars.
In the images above, the Aksla mountain stands out over the city. Twice while we were there we went up to the top. Here is the view of Ålesund from the lookout on Aksla on the evening we arrived:
Sometimes, I take photo after photo. I turn a few degrees and snap another image. If I’m lucky, a few hours later Google tells me it has made a panorama, stitching together my shots into one long vista. I love these panoramas. They gesture at the incredible vastness of these landscapes.
But sometimes too, the artifact of the computer process that searches and stitches the images together is visible. Sometimes, something has gone wrong. In the panorama below, I think the culprit was the moving car. I took the component photographs a second or two apart, and as the car moved on, the angle changed. When the algorithm assembled the panorama, it created this strange bend in the coastline at the base of the mountain.
In their own way, I love these “erring” panoramas too. They show the artifact of the process, the algorithm that attempts to make itself invisible but in these moments shows itself. I can see the way it tried to match water with water, mountain with mountain. I can see the computer attempting to reconcile the inconsistencies–the mountain itself matches quite well, but the water, nearer to my camera and so more changed by the movement of the car, becomes distorted.
As we made our journey homeward, we took a route that brought us by the mouth of the Geiranger Fjord, a UNESCO World Heritage site, one of the most spectacular and least developed fjord landscapes in Norway. Five years ago, with my husband and parents-in-law, we got to travel through the Geiranger by boat. Seeing one vista of it now from land, I was again entranced. These massive mountains. The yellowing birch leaves. The great expanse of ocean threading deep into the land and the white line of the new snow–I felt so fortunate to be here.
We made it home again for the start of the new school week. In truth, it’s been difficult. I am behind on work. I have grading, planning, meetings–sometimes I feel like I am drowning. To clear my head, I get a coffee, walk down to the fjord edge. There is a dock with steps down to the water where I sit. I snap a few photos as the mist billows up.
This weekend, I’ll try to catch up with what I need to do for work. I’m thankful to be here in this place, which continues to move me with its beauty. I’ll keep taking photographs of scenery and seeing which ones that algorithm stitches up to make a panorama.
Thanks for stopping by. Wishing you well, wishing you calm and peace and beauty around you,
Jimmy
Words like trees 
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