A small boat rests on still water between steep mountain walls, and the fjord mirrors the whole valley. Then the clouds start to race. Norwegian photographer Morten Rustad of Rustad Media spent five months on the road to make Norway – A Time-Lapse Adventure, a five-minute film that crosses the country from the fjords of the southwest to the bare tundra of the far north.
A road trip through all 19 counties
Rustad released the film on Vimeo on 29 September 2014. He drove roughly 15,000 km, around 10,000 miles, and visited every one of Norway’s 19 counties, shooting tens of thousands of still photographs with a camera and an intervalometer. Strung together, those frames become the moving sequences of the film.
The county count belongs to its time. On 1 January 2020 a reform merged Norway’s 19 counties into 11; after the Storting voted in 2022 to partly reverse it, the country has had 15 counties since 1 January 2024.
Fjords, tundra and northern lights
The film moves through Norway’s great contrasts. Deep fjords in the southwest give way to what Rustad described as a “moon landscape” in the north, and the aurora borealis ripples over the Arctic sky. Between the wilderness scenes come towns and cities, filmed in both summer and winter, so the same country appears in long summer light and under snow.
The soundtrack was composed for the film by Jogeir Daae Mæland, and it carries the edit at the slow, steady pace that suits clouds and light.
Why time-lapse suits Norway
Time-lapse compresses minutes or hours into seconds. A mountain stays fixed while cloud streams over it; shadows sweep down a valley; the surface of a fjord shifts from glass to ripple. In a landscape as large and still as Norway’s, that movement shows the shape of the land in a way a single photograph cannot.
It also takes patience. Each sequence means setting up, waiting and shooting for long stretches, often in cold or changeable weather, which is why five months produced five minutes of film.
Seeing the landscapes yourself
Many of the scenes Rustad filmed are places travellers can reach. For walks to the famous viewpoints, read about Trolltunga and Preikestolen; for high mountains, Jotunheimen; and for Arctic light, Lofoten’s long spring twilight.
If you try time-lapse yourself, stay with one view through a change of light. Use a sturdy tripod, set the camera to manual exposure and keep spare batteries warm in an inside pocket.
For an aurora seen without time-lapse, watch Kwon O Chul’s real-time recording. For another North Atlantic town between mountains and sea, visit the Klaksvík photo feature, and for a lonelier western road, see Mathieu Le Lay’s American Loneliness trailer.
Related reading
- Kwon O Chul’s real-time recording
- Klaksvík photo feature
- Mathieu Le Lay’s American Loneliness trailer
- Trolltunga, Norway: The View and the Walk Behind It
- Norefjell’s Electrical Flash: The Norwegian Caption Explained
- Preikestolen: Appreciating the View with Space Around You
- Jotunheimen, Norway: Mountain Country Beyond a Single Famous Ridge
- The Arctic Light: Lofoten’s Long Spring Twilight
- Aurora from Norway, Alaska and Orbit
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