Tuesday, so we focus on the stunning landscapes of Iceland. The Vatnajökull glacier shares some its detail.
For the foreseeable future, I will dedicate my Tuesday posts to the landscape of Iceland. This magnificent country stimulates my photographic curiosity and spark at every twist and turn. It is almost impossible to not be at a location where there is some stunning subject to capture. Among these subjects, I am always enchanted by the immense glaciers.
I decided to rework one of the detail shots of Vatnajökull…
Vatnajökull Detail
The Vatnajökull glacier is the largest in Iceland and covers approximately 7,700 square kilometers. In this image, I took a section of the image below and treated it to highlight the delicate structure of the glacier.
Vatnajokull Glacier
This shot is from my August 2022 visit to Iceland and shows a bit of green. In future posts, I will feature some of the shots from February of 2024, which show a very different aspect of this powerful glacier.
An impromptu iPhone image at the Vatnajökull glacier, highlighting a striking contrast of colors against a muddy meltwater pond.
This week I am going for an image that I shot during a 2022 photography trip to Iceland. We were shooting in somewhat challenging conditions, due to wind and rain; also the light wasn’t great, but the scenery was still stunning! As we had been photographing the Vatnajökull glacier for a while, I packed up my camera and tripod before the trek back to the van.
Taking back a different route, I looked back and saw this scene…
Vatnajökull View
As I didn’t feel like setting up for another shot, I took a couple of snaps with my iPhone, the last of which resulted in the above image. There is just enough color to provide some contrast with the murky, muddy meltwater pond.
It just goes to show that sometimes, we just have to get lucky!
I’m confident that many of us have heard the statement ‘That must be a great camera’ when someone sees one of our images. And yes, my Canon EOS R5 is a fantastic camera, but I have a backup camera that is equally fantastic!
On a really rainy day in Iceland, it’s kind of interesting to take a quick shot with your mobile phone and see how it looks. Plus, the reason I take at least one shot wherever I do a shoot is that it provides location data, which can come in handy when you’re trying to remember the spelling of an Icelandic location.
Vatnajökull Glacier
After doing a shoot (see Vatnajökull and Jökulsárlón – part 1) to get some interesting images,I noticed a slightly different angle to take this shot with my iPhone. One of the cool features is that the logic in the camera app is very smart about balancing exposure and making clouds appear dramatic. To be honest, I really like this shot, as it presents a mood that fit the scene.
Jökulsárlón Lagoon
This shot was an impromptu capture, as it was raining pretty hard, making it a bit cumbersome to do another tripod-mounted camera setup (despite rain gear for the camera, it’s always a bit of struggle to deal with fogging, those pesky rain drops on a filter, etc.) . So I pulled my iPhone out of my dry pocket and took this low angle shot. The blue of the ice, drama of the clouds and rain drops on the water came across rather nicely.
Both images were processed using Luminar AI and touched up in Photoshop.
I look forward to hearing about the opportunities that your mobile phone has provided you to capture that special image.
Nature’s code lies in front of us; can we understand her?
As I was going through the significant numbers of my Iceland photos, something caught my eye, so I thought that I’d share it with you:
Structure: pressure and time.
The reason that this stood out to me might just be that my brain started finding additional, hidden images in this field created by time and pressure. Nature put additional information for us to interpret, giving us the challenge of reaching an understanding of the many mysteries that surround us.
What is the message that you receive from this glacial enigma?
The second of two posts on the impressive glacier Vatnajökull and its offspring. Photography on a rainy, windy day might be challenging, but it’s still worth it when landscapes are this amazing!
In the previous post in this series (Vatnajökull and Jökulsárlón (part 1)) the focus was squarely on the main feature of the two, Vatnajökull, the magnificent glacier. While not as imposing as the glacier, Jökulsárlón, literally ‘glacial river lagoon’ is a wonderful source of images and a backdrop for four Hollywood movies.
This is truly a river that carries glacial output from the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier across the lagoon toward the Atlantic Ocean. Breiðamerkurjökull is an outlet glacier of Vatnajökull, as icebergs break away from it, slowly floating away; some of these icebergs can spend as much as 5 years in the lagoon, depending on their size, before they are small enough to make it to the ocean.
Jökulsárlón ice flows
The ice flows in the above image are near the exit of the lagoon, where they will meet the Atlantic Ocean. As these blocks of ice meet the ocean, some break up and chunks are driven back onto a black sand beach, also known as Diamond Beach. On a sunny day, they are a spectacular sight.
Jökulsárlon icebergs
The iceberg sections above still show the striations of the dirt that has been collected along the path of the glacier, to be covered with snow and ice; this gives a sense of the age of the ice, somewhat akin to the rings of trees. Notice also that certain parts of the ice have a distinct glacial blue color; this ice has been compressed into a crystalline structure that is more reflective of the blue area of the visible spectrum.
Weathering the day in Jökulsárlón
Despite it being a rainy day, neither the birds nor the photographers were discouraged from checking out this magical location. It did convince me that it will be wonderful to spend a couple of hours here to photograph its beauty on a sunny day!
As you might imagine, I will certainly want to come back to explore Iceland more in the future!
The first of two posts on the impressive glacier Vatnajökull and its offspring. Photography on a rainy, windy day might be challenging, but it’s still worth it when landscapes are this amazing!
The land of Ice and Fire provides magnificent displays of both, and I was fortunate enough to get to experience the entire spectrum during my recent photography tour.
I will dedicate two posts this week to the ice marvels presented by Vatnajökull and Jökulsárlón. Let’s start with the Glacier of Lakes, as Vatnajökull translates, which is the largest ice cap in Iceland and the second largest in Europe. With an average thickness of 380m, it is rather imposing.
Despite the fact that we visited on a rather rainy (and windy, as in hold on to your tripod, lest it blows over), it was inspiring to visit both sites. After a short hike from our parking location, there was a great location to get a complete view of the ablation zone of the glacier:
The Foot of Vatnajökull
As I walked toward this area to set up my tripod, I was greeted by the sound and view of a segment of the glacier breaking off; it was a small section, but still awe inspiring to experience. It is clear from the amount of dirt that is embedded in the ice that a lot of material is collected, as the glacier progress downhill at its slow pace. Of course, the forces exerted by this mass of ice and snow are tremendous and landscape altering.
Vatnajökull Glacier ablation
This second image is a bit further away, so that it provides a better view of the ice sections (miniature icebergs) that have broken loose from VatnaJökull, and have started their journey, as they float along.
In the next post, I’ll cover the lagoon that is also fed by Vatnajökull: Jökulsárlón.
Both of these images are HDR composites of captures at -2.3, 0.0 and 1.3 EV and combined using Skylum’s Aurora HDR. I’m a big fan Aurora HDR, as it not only does a stellar job of the HDR processing, but also makes it easy to make some quick adjustments that provide a sense of what the final image can look like.
After the HDR composites are finalized, I do clean up and touch up in Adobe Photoshop; on a rainy day, there was no avoiding getting some droplet on the lens filter, which had to be removed in post-processing. I did some further balancing of the exposure, as the sky was rather bright compared to the foreground.
