I can’t get enough of Iceland and especially a spot known as the iceberg lagoon Jokulsarlon. This is one of the most visited areas in Iceland not to mention photographed, so finding unique images is hard. I have found a few though and this is one. I places the ice at the top of the images and let the water and a chunk of black ice carry your eye to the horizon.
I have been to Iceland many times and it is one the best places in the world for a landscape photographer to visit. Just about everywhere you look there is incredible scenes begging to be photographed. I was with my friend and Iceland guide Daniel Bergman when we were leaving one such place. This is the result of stopping and taking that one last shot.
One of the major attraction in Iceland is Gullfoss which is a large really cool waterfall. Typically when I travel and photograph in Iceland I like to go where others don’t go or at least try to see the place and image differently. well Gullfoos is no different. Buses of tourist show up here and most of the time we avoid this place like the plague. But, we had sometime and decided to at least stop and admire this cool place. I decided to try and shoot it differently . I used my Olympus OMD5 and did a series of bracketed exposures and then worked them in post processing. I ended up with a different kind of prehistoric gritty look. Works for me.
Staying with my style from this trip to Iceland I am staying with BW images. This was shot with a 55mm lens on a Phase One DF+ with an IQ260 digital back. I converted it to BW in post processing.
This image was made on another cold and windy evening. The sky was so dramatic. The surf was crashing all around us. I waited and then took a long exposure of the scene to blur our and smooth the water. The shot in color was just to blue and grey from the mist and no light. So I converted it to black and white and it worked great. Shot with a Phase One IQ260 and 55mm lens 40 seconds.
It has been an overcast week in Iceland. So, I have spent a lot of time working my images into black and white. Here is a shot made on a beach that is full of icebergs A very special and surreal place. I wanted to show the surf and iceberg. In color it just didn’t have any real definition. But after I turned it into BW I was able to play with the image until I got the shot above. I shot this with a Phase One IQ260 and a 240mm lens.
Another incredible day. I seem to be coming away each day on this trip to Iceland with at least one keeper a day. Remember I am trying to shoot different. This is a nine image stitched shot done with a Phase One IQ260 and a 55mm LS lens. Converted to BW in Silver eFex 2. Shot in Stokksnes, Iceland
Today was one of those gray days you get sometimes in Iceland. Cold, and very strange dull light. In the afternoon though we went to shoot a small glacier bay. I need to get the name of it but it was not as large as some in Iceland. I parked myself at the top of this small overlook and shot a bunch of images. I tried a wide angle and even a long lens. Then I decided to try an 80mm lens and take 6 images and then stitch them together. Bingo, I think it worked. Sometimes when you are out shooting you just have to stay in one place and wait and mess around with things until you nail it.
I always said I wouldn’t post pictures of flowers, cats and myself. I am a rule breaker. Pixel my cat has now graced the blog a few times and now I am going to grace the pages here. This was shot in the same ice cave as the previous image. I did it as a self portrait. Focused set the time and jumped in the shot. How often will I get a photo of me in an ice cave under a glacier? I rest my point.
In addition to the regular PODAS workshops we do we sometimes tag along on some of our instructor workshops and bring along Phase One gear fro attendees to use. I am presently in Iceland with Daniel Bergman, Andy Biggs, and Josh Holka exploring many locations and taking some excellent images. One of my goals on this trip other than sharing our cameras was to text the NEW IQ 260 in long exposure mode as well as to put the new 240mm lens. The lens is incredible and I have been pushing the 260 as hard as I can The IQ260 has the capability to do long exposure. So what better place to take it than deep under a big glacier. The image above was a 4 minute exposure in essentially a dark chamber under a glacier. First the experience of crawling around in a glacier is a bit unnerving to say the least. Then you stumble upon this beautiful icicle that had to be 12 feet in the air. You set the camera up in darkness, shine your headlamp onto the icicle to focus and try an exposure. Turns out the exposure was 4 minutes at f-16. It was amazing to see what the sensor saw that we didn’t. The bottom part of the image was pulled from shadow area that on initial viewing was all black. We did a bit of saturation and some highlight recovery. I think the 240 did a good job. If I had a bit more time I may have tried a 6-8 minute exposure and tried to pull the histogram a bit more to the right.