Norrbyskär Archipelago National Park, SwedenClas Tegenfeldt2001-08-10 |
The Norrbyskär archipelago lies about 600 km north of Stockholm, 40 km south of Umeå. I am fortunate to have grown up here, and now I am able to return here each summer. The island "Slipen" is small, only two islands lie farther from the shore, then it is the Baltic sea until you reach Finland. In the summers, which are quite short, the nature really blossoms in the almost never ending light. It lies about 350 km south of the polar circle so there is no true midnight sun, but it never gets dark until late august. In june the sun is barely below the horizon and you have a sunset that becomes a sunrise, not for a few minutes but for a few hours... In june the sun may set around half past eleven and rise again about two hours later. Some (rare) nights about one o´clock, depending on weather conditions, the whole sky, water and everything else may turn really golden yellow, a fantastic sight! I didn´t see it this year, but 1999 it was truly unbelievable...
The climate here is harsh, as is evident on everything you see around you, some pine trees may be two meters high even though they are twenty years old... Timber gets washed ashore and you can find big ones 20-30 meters from the shoreline... We tried building a landing stage (bridge) for our boat, the nature took it back... We had used two 3+ ton cement blocks but the ice just pushed them away. More amazingly the ice just cut a railway rail in two halfs, a clean cut! Nature shows its muscles sometimes.
Anyway, this gallery contains pictures taken in late july and beginning of august 2001. The camera used
was the Minolta Dimage D7, which I just had recieved a few days before we went there. The
camera fullfilled almost everything I had wished and hoped it would do. I also own a Nikon coolpix
CP990 which has served us very well, it was also with us on this trip and those images will be
in another gallery at this website. The images are resized to a quarter their native size, they
are also quite heavily compressed, so the image quality is far from the original images which are
just stunning, the D7 can deliver very impressive imagery. The websized imagery is hopefully fast
enough to load even on modem and gives you an idea of the real thing. The photos can never
substitute the real thing, being there, they are memories and a temptation for others
to go out in the nature and explore - wherever that may be.
ENJOY!
Clas Tegenfeldt, tegen@bemi.se
