THE FAROE ISLANDS 2025: A 4×5 PORTFOLIO
THE FAROE ISLANDS: BETWEEN WATER AND SKY, NATURE AND MAN
I often get asked which one, among all the destination we go to, is my favourite. That is a question I have a very hard time answering. I really do love all the places my wife and I keep returning to – albeit for different reasons – and if we did go anywhere that I did not find particularly inspiring to work on, we just wouldn’t go back again.
That said, at any given time, in over 15 years of career photographing the landscape, there have been places I found more inspiring than others. Perhaps, they are closer to my heart; perhaps it’s because I went there during a phase of my photographic development which made them more suitable for me at the time; or perhaps there is no logical explanation for that and it is just part of the magic of photography.
The Faroe Islands are one of these places.
A small archipelago made of 18 major islands and hundreds of minor ones, with a population of under 60.000 people, the Faroe Islands offer a somehow disconcerting juxtaposition of very rugged, wild-looking and wild-feeling landscapes, where one can feel like one is alone in a prehistoric setting, paired with the awareness that there is always a house, a pier, a ruin, a village, a town very close by, even if one can not see it.
That is, if you go there off the touristic season, as we always do.
The Faroese landscapes offer such a variety of photographic opportunities that, after spending about six months photographing the Faroes, between all my trips there, I still find hard to believe.
You have the grand vistas, with fjords endlessly unfolding in front of you when you look down from atop one of the hundreds of ridges you can get up to. You have geological formations shaped by the ocean that would rival any other; and not just the large, iconic ones such as arches or sea stacks, but a myriad of smaller ones, rocks sculpted by the elements in the most bizarre shapes which you can spend months photographing without ever getting bored.
You have man-made signs marking the landscapes, be it old piers, huts, houses, small villages, bridges, churches, even sculptures, all so wonderfully placed in the landscape that you might think a painter, a landscape photographer, a poet where asked to advise when they were built.
And then, you have the water.
The water, on the Faroe Islands, is a presence you feel like in very few other places – I dare to say, even in Scotland and Ireland water does not feel such a leading character in the story as it does on the Faroes, one with such a distinct, ever-changing personality.
The Faroe Islands are shapes in such a way that you are always, inevitably, inescapably surrounded by water. Famously, no point on the Faroes is more than 5 kilometres from the ocean. And then there is the fleeting water, the one is not always there but can be at any time.
On the Faroes, you can get drenched by rain on a beautiful, clean day. You have unexpected waterfalls appearing out of nowhere all along the mountain sides after heavy rains. You have permanent ones that change in size so dramatically when it rains that you wouldn’t believe they are the same you saw a day before.
In March 2025, my wife and I spent over three weeks on the Faroes, between our Workshops and my personal work; this time, however, I went there for the first time with my Arca-Swiss F-Line 4×5” film camera.
One of the things you should know about working on the Faroe Islands is that the weather calls the shots. Not just in terms of having favourable light, as it does anywhere else, but in terms of being able to actually stand on your feet when it’s windy; of not drown under torrential rains; of staying on the road when an unexpected snowstorm keeps going for two weeks on islands that are not as ready for such weather as, for instance, Iceland; and so on.
As bizarre as it may sound, the weather is in large part the reason for the huge appeal that the Faroes have for me. The light, the sky, the ocean and the ensuing mood are so inspiring that during my years on Faroe prior to 2025 I have gladly dealt with conditions that would have made most people run for cover, and have been happy to do so – almost to the point of not noticing the weather at all.
But, in 2025 I knew I had to face technical challenges I never had to face on my previous trips to the Faroes.
Even with mild weather, the ground on the Faroes is not always grippy; ledges on the ocean’s side can be extremely slippery; peaty soil can be spongy and offer no stability; and so on. Add to that strong winds, rain, snow, sea spray, and you’ll see why I knew I had to get creative.
The first step is tripod and head, of course. Large format film need rock solid support; I had my FLM CP38-L4 and my Arca-Swiss P0, which are a super-solid combination keeping most gear secure. But, even that sometimes cannot prevent your camera to move under heavy winds (see TAG: LARGE FORMAT for more Portfolios created with this beautiful medium, and the challenges I had to face and solve in the field), and after my Spring 2025 season I upgraded my tripod to a Gitzo Series 5, and my head to an Arca-Swiss Z1+, which made a lot of difference.
The next step was technique. Shielding the tripod and camera from the wind really helped; as did a careful use of spikes and creative leg placement in the field.
Then, I put my usual “weatherproof” Workflow to work, which is as follows:
1. Shooting a photo with the “metered” exposure, even if that would be faster than what I wanted for a given scene. Since this is normally safe enough against micro-movement, doing so allows me to have at least one good photograph per composition as well as have a sort of “reference” image, to check long exposed photographs against for sharpness, exposure and so on.
2. Shooting one photo with my preferred exposure for the scene. If the wind and overall stability conditions looked safe, that’s it. If conditions looked difficult, I then took one or two more photos, with exposures in-between the metered one and the ideal one I want. In most cases, I ended up with 3/4 negatives for each composition.
This workflow worked great for me on the Faroes: the metered exposure photograph always turned out perfect, and in the few cases when my longer exposure images showed some micro-movement, one out of the one or two extra photographs I took was always perfect.
Our 2025 visit to the Faroe Islands resulted in a Portfolio featuring 44 photographs. Below you will find a selection of it for you to enjoy, starting with natural landscapes (click on the photographs to enlarge):
Then, landscapes with man-made elements (click on the photographs to enlarge):
All photographs have been taken with an Arca-Swiss F-Line camera, equipped with a Schneider Super-Angulon 47mm f/5.6 XL, Nikon Nikkor SW 75mm f/4.5 S, Nikon Nikkor W 150mm f/5.6 S, on Ilford FP4+ rated at 100 ISO.
The film has been pre-washed in water for 5 minutes and developed in Pyrocat-HD for 13 minutes and 30 seconds, 10 inversions at start followed by 3 inversions per minute. Negatives have been digitised using a Fujifilm GFX100S II with a 120mm Macro and processed in Photoshop.
Thank you for joining me on this trip to the Faroe Islands, it has been a pleasure to share this Portfolio with you!
Thank you for reading this post, I hope you enjoyed it! Why don’t you share it with your friends, or drop me a comment to let me know your thoughts about this?