Marcus Möller and Johannes Hegner spent an amazing couple of days capturing the nature of northern Sweden — Ottsjö and Åre — and came home with a sunset we won't forget.
Some trips are for a client; some are for the love of flying. This one was the second kind. Marcus Möller and Johannes Hegner took a couple of days in the mountains around Ottsjö and Åre, in northern Sweden's Jämtland, to do what got us into this in the first place — put cameras in the air over wild country and see what the light does.
We packed light and flew three very different aircraft: the DJI Mavic 4 Pro, our cinema FPV rig and the DJI Avata. Between them they cover just about everything a landscape can ask for — and the payoff was a sunset that lit the whole valley on fire.
Ottsjö and Åre — flying the Jämtland mountains
The area around Ottsjön and Åre is some of the most photogenic terrain in Sweden: still mountain lakes, deep pine forest, and the bare rounded fells catching the last of the light. It's the kind of landscape that only fully reveals itself from the air — the scale of a lake, the sweep of a treeline, the way a mountain throws its reflection across mirror-flat water.
Long Nordic summer evenings give you a golden hour that stretches for hours, and weather that changes by the minute. That's a gift and a challenge: endless soft light to work with, but you have to read the sky and be airborne at exactly the right moment.
Three drones, three jobs
The DJI Mavic 4 Pro did the heavy lifting on the big landscape frames — clean, stabilised, high-resolution aerials and reflection panoramas that hold every bit of detail in the grade. It's a compact platform that punches well above its size for scenics like these.
For movement with feeling we flew the cinema FPV rig — diving down treelines and skimming the water to put the viewer inside the landscape rather than above it. The nimble DJI Avata filled in the tight, agile shots and proximity work, small enough to launch from a rock ledge and thread between the pines.
Chasing the light
Everything built toward the sunset. As the storm clouds broke, the sky went deep pink and violet over the fells and the low sun raked gold across the forest — the kind of ten-minute window you plan a whole evening around. Batteries staged, shots blocked out in advance, we flew it while it lasted.
That's the reward of a trip like this: no brief but the landscape itself, and a sunset that made the climb worth it.
From the trip
Frequently asked
- Do you shoot landscape and nature aerials in northern Sweden?
- Yes. We're based in the Stockholm area and shoot across Sweden — including the mountains of Jämtland around Åre and Ottsjö — for film, tourism, brand and landscape work. We plan around the terrain, weather and long Nordic light.
- Which drones do you use for landscape aerials?
- It depends on the shot. We fly the DJI Mavic 4 Pro for clean, high-resolution landscape frames and panoramas, a cinema FPV rig for immersive moving shots through the terrain, and the DJI Avata for agile, tight proximity work — often all on the same trip.
- What's the best time to capture Nordic landscapes from the air?
- The long summer golden hours in northern Sweden are hard to beat — soft, low light that can last for hours around sunset. Weather changes fast in the mountains, so we plan flights around the light and stay ready for the short windows when it all comes together.
