For a few years a while back I went to every annual summer Viking market at Foteviken just south of Malmö to take pictures because, as a history nerd I thought it was so cool to see people in (at least somewhat period accurate) Viking costumes, re-enacting the time period. Then I felt I had photographed that to the best of both my abilities as well as my interest (mostly the latter), but in 2018 I thought “I’ve never shot the event on film, so that might be a new angle!”
So the morning of market day I packed myself and my a lot less analog enthusiastic dad into the car and drove south to the event. I did get a little bit trigger happy with my Canon TLb at the market area, so I ran the risk of having to swap film rolls in the middle of the pretend battle they put on, which would not be an ideal situation (I'm getting faster at film roll swaps, but I am not THAT fast yet). Therefore there are no shots from that particular battle in this blog post. The brief I gave to myself after all, was to do it all analog. It was an entertaining battle though!
I liked shooting analog at the market so much that I figured I'd have another go at Viking photography two weekends later when the Battle for Trelleborgen in Trelleborg happened. That time I decided to go all analog and try to shoot the battle too on film. Let's just say that I need to work on that some more in the future! I have managed to salvage some of the shots in post enough to put them in a gallery below, but I am definitely not ecstatic with the result; I want my more action-oriented shots with my analog setup to be better…but I guess that’s what comes later after shooting a lot more!
The market shots from there were kind of cool though and I got to shoot some with my medium format 1950s Zeiss Ikon Nettar too. I did get a few looks when I brought that out to shoot with...it's so old it almost looked like it could belong at the event as a prop (at least when it was folded up in the leather carrying case)!
Medium format shot from the Trelleborgen event
