
Four days hiking in Lapland at Hetta-Pallas trail was truly a beautiful experience. Me and my friends traveled to Lapland in early September, hoping to catch the fleeting moment when the autumn colours are at their best. It turned out we were a week early and so the ground ruska (ruska is what we finns call the autumn colours) was not at its best.
Everytime me and my friends go out for a hike, I shoot a lot of pictures and sometimes also video. The videos are always “too” long, but I don’t shoot them really for public use, they are more of an extension of my own memory. So on this trek I shot stills and video too.
I carried three cameras with me. My backpack weighed about 25 kilograms, so I did think long and hard whether or not I REALLY wanted to carry 2,5 kilograms worth of delicate tech with me. After days of pondering, I decided I needed all of them and it turned out I was right. I used all of them for the specific purposes I carried them and I think the material I got turned out great.
My travel cameras
My cameras were Samsung NX 1 with the 16-50mm S lens, DJI Osmo and Olympus MJU 2.
Last year we went on a 5-day hike and I had two cameras with me, one mainly for stills and the other for video. I shot a trip video (22 minutes of awesome memories) and struggled in post with all the hand held shots. With a heavy backpack acting as a counter weight, it is possible to shoot very stable shots hand held. Problems with shakiness arise, when trying to walk and shoot video at the same time. It doesn’t work so well. So I needed something to give me some good, stable walking shots. I used a small gimbal DJI Osmo for those.
The Samsung with an external mic was my main video camera for higher quality camp videos and the Olympus MJU 2 film camera was hanging around my neck all the time. I was packed with my 7 remaining rolls of expired Velvia and I ended up shooting 6 of them. I hadn’t tested my MJU 2 camera before the trip, so I took a huge gamble. The light seals could’ve been ruined and all of my precious rolls would have gone to waste. I really should have shot a test roll and have it developed before the trip, but I never got around to do it. So I gambled and this time, I lucked out.
My film setup of choice
I took my MJU 2 with me because it is known for its sharp lens, it is “weather proof” and very light. I could easily walk all day and my neck didn’t get strained at all. My film of choice was Velvia ISO 50 with an expiry date in 2007. The expired film did not work for me this time around. All of the pictures were very blue and almost none ‘ruska’ was present in the pictures. So I resorted to color correcting them.
Is post processing allowed?
I’m not sure how I feel about post processing film pictures. It kind of destroys one of the reasons I shoot film. You get what you shoot, but on the other hand, it is possible to do all kinds of PP in the darkroom too, so why wouldn’t I do digital PP to the scans? I decided on a pragmatic approach. I felt the pictures were unusable for me as they were and decided to do color correcting and even some other adjustments. If you’d like, please write a comment and share me your perspective: is it “allowed” to do PP to film scans?
Here is an example of original and color corrected photograph.


Photos from our Hetta-Pallas hike
Here is a collection of selected pictures from our trip. The slides were scanned by Kameratori and I really liked the results.















This year’s trip video has a deadline, it must be ready on January. That’s when the premiere is! 🙂