Monday’s Moment – Portfolio v2.1

The challenge and joy of pulling together a portfolio. The memories of the circumstances are relived in this process.

As I have started in earnest to begin to pull together a more comprehensive portfolio, I’m also beginning to realize how monumental a task this may be. There are just a lot of images to go through and I really want to do a solid job gathering all that might come into play.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that it’s an unpleasant task, as part of the fun is looking at older shots and remembering things about the time and situation. Among these, this is one…

Fixer-Upper near Vik

As there might be an opportunity to capture the Aurora Borealis while we were in Vik, a bit of location scouting was needed. Part of my thoughts about shooting the Northern Lights was that there should be a certain amount of interesting landscape silhouetted with the sky’s light display. Plus we should be far enough from any town to reduce light pollution.

This field became the location for our Aurora shoot a couple of days later (cf. A Return to Iceland post). It helped that there was good access by road and far enough away from a main road, and the experience was amazing!

A note about the process I am using to organize my portfolio; Lightroom is my tool of choice, as it enables me to quickly go through images. If I see an image that I want to take a closer look at later, I give it a rating of 1 star. On a second, slower pass I take the time to decide whether this image actually speaks to me, in which case I upgrade its rating. Sometimes this does mean that I will take a quick dive into processing the image to get some idea of what the end result might be.

There will be more on progress!

A Return to Iceland

The Aurora Borealis in Iceland was magnificent, as captured in this video!

First of all, greetings to everyone! It’s been too long since my last post for all the wrong reasons.

Great news is my recent return to Iceland for the third time. This was the first foray into the land of Fire and Ice during the Winter season, as I wanted to see even more of the Ice part of this beautiful country. During ten days in February, my traveling companion, George Fellner, and I spent some quality time photographing the amazing landscapes in their Winter glory.

Here’s my first item to share from this epic journey (it’s almost 4 minutes long, and I hope you enjoy all of it along with the soundtrack):

Aurora in Vik, Iceland

This was the first time in my life that I experienced the Aurora Borealis in person, and it was absolutely magical, breathtaking and astounding!

We had scoped out a location ahead of time, which would provide a bit of foreground in the form of the hills that you see in these images; the location is about 20 minutes from the town of Vik, and definitely not the most popular place, as we had it to ourselves. A number of other locations had large groups of people gathered, as we could even hear them in the quiet of the night.

After setting up around 9 pm, I spent some time ensuring that all the camera settings were within a range that would work, dialing in the exposure on my remote trigger. Just after 10 pm, the first glimpses of the aurora started showing in the sky, much to our excitement! For the next hour we were treated to this magnificent celestial display.

For the photography nerds, these images were capture on the Canon EOS R5 using the 15-35mm f2.8L RF lens. I kept my aperture wide open at f2.8 and set ISO to 800. During the shoot I made some adjustments to exposure lengths depending on strength of the aurora; exposure was typically around 20 seconds.

Hope you enjoy this as much as I did!