Do You Want Ice With That?
It didn’t matter that we’d seen it on YouTube a gazillion times already. That we’d pored over Flickr for images from here had no effect whatsoever. When we pulled up in the car park and saw it for ourselves for the very first time, two pairs of eyes popped out of their sockets as if on cartoon springs and boinged about in front of us as we gasped in amazement. Boinged? Is that even a word? West Brom fans say it is, so we’ll go with it. Jokulsarlon was bonkers, and so were we at first sight. It was as if we’d arrived at a seaport, yet instead of mighty ships waiting to carry us off on a cruise, a chaos of white and blue forms. Every one of them uniquely shaped and ever changing, littering the lagoon, silent, yet moving away from the glacier towards the ocean at a speed that was barely detectable.
We’d arrived late in the evening, and though it was still quite busy, there was space to roam quietly alone, and I edged away from what crowds there were along the shoreline towards the glacier, until the only sound I could hear was that of large chunks of ice cracking and buckling mournfully out on the water. From the glacier they would break free, floating around like the world’s slowest rubber ducks in a bathtub, nodding to each other silently under the endless Icelandic daylight. Each of them knowing that after two hundred years or more of being trapped in an enormous blue wall of ice, they’d soon be swept away along the shortest river in Iceland, beneath that handsome white suspension bridge and onto Diamond Beach for the final act. If you’d bought a bottle of gin with you, here was the place to grab a chunk or two to bring it to the proper temperature. Sadly, I didn’t have gin. Happily I had a camera. And a spare one just in case.
The hinterland glacier creaked and heaved under a glowing envelope of late sunlight, that poked through dark clouds and ignited the scene before me, blazing a golden path across the lagoon. Up until now our visit to Iceland had delivered the sort of conditions we’d grimly acknowledged we would simply have to “work with,” but now we had some light to get excited about at last. Quite why I was shooting at f22, I really can’t say four years later. Perhaps I was in too much of a hurry to attach a filter in the days before I bought the magnetic ones that I can attach in no time at all. And here was the trade off between wanting to smooth out the water whilst not blurring the icebergs. At a second I seemed to be just about getting away with it. Three seconds and the blurring started to drop hints. But for many of those images taken here, I’d thoughtlessly aimed at thirty seconds. This, and the fact that we only passed here at midday three years later means I need to return to the glacier lagoon another time, this time at the right time, and opening the shutter for the right amount of time. Hopefully finding cleaner, simpler compositions amongst the icy debris. That’s a lot of things to get right. Seriously – f22? Still, it didn’t put me off having a go at reworking the image.
It seems strange that with so many images from last year’s visit to work on, I’ve found myself returning to the earlier 2019 trip a few times recently. A trip where we raced around in a hurry, seeing everything but seeing so little, barely able to get to grips with a location before moving onto the next one, which might have been a hundred miles or more away. Getting nowhere whatsoever when the clouds descended and hid everything from sight at two of the locations we’d been most excited about. I never felt I’d told the full story of that first visit to Iceland either. And I’m forever learning, trying to improve on the previous edit, hopefully getting somewhere even with such a cluttered scene as this. Will I still be unearthing images from the 2022 adventure in another four years’ time? Probably. Especially as I haven’t even started on so many of them yet. It’s like having a treasure chest that you can keep dipping into, finding images to shake out memories that need to written down, remembered and shared.
So I’ll carry on dusting off those older images, revisiting the raw files and seeing whether I’ve got any further forward in the editing process. After all, if there’s a golden glow over a lagoon full of icebergs to be worked on, it seems the obvious thing to do.
Do You Want Ice With That?
It didn’t matter that we’d seen it on YouTube a gazillion times already. That we’d pored over Flickr for images from here had no effect whatsoever. When we pulled up in the car park and saw it for ourselves for the very first time, two pairs of eyes popped out of their sockets as if on cartoon springs and boinged about in front of us as we gasped in amazement. Boinged? Is that even a word? West Brom fans say it is, so we’ll go with it. Jokulsarlon was bonkers, and so were we at first sight. It was as if we’d arrived at a seaport, yet instead of mighty ships waiting to carry us off on a cruise, a chaos of white and blue forms. Every one of them uniquely shaped and ever changing, littering the lagoon, silent, yet moving away from the glacier towards the ocean at a speed that was barely detectable.
We’d arrived late in the evening, and though it was still quite busy, there was space to roam quietly alone, and I edged away from what crowds there were along the shoreline towards the glacier, until the only sound I could hear was that of large chunks of ice cracking and buckling mournfully out on the water. From the glacier they would break free, floating around like the world’s slowest rubber ducks in a bathtub, nodding to each other silently under the endless Icelandic daylight. Each of them knowing that after two hundred years or more of being trapped in an enormous blue wall of ice, they’d soon be swept away along the shortest river in Iceland, beneath that handsome white suspension bridge and onto Diamond Beach for the final act. If you’d bought a bottle of gin with you, here was the place to grab a chunk or two to bring it to the proper temperature. Sadly, I didn’t have gin. Happily I had a camera. And a spare one just in case.
The hinterland glacier creaked and heaved under a glowing envelope of late sunlight, that poked through dark clouds and ignited the scene before me, blazing a golden path across the lagoon. Up until now our visit to Iceland had delivered the sort of conditions we’d grimly acknowledged we would simply have to “work with,” but now we had some light to get excited about at last. Quite why I was shooting at f22, I really can’t say four years later. Perhaps I was in too much of a hurry to attach a filter in the days before I bought the magnetic ones that I can attach in no time at all. And here was the trade off between wanting to smooth out the water whilst not blurring the icebergs. At a second I seemed to be just about getting away with it. Three seconds and the blurring started to drop hints. But for many of those images taken here, I’d thoughtlessly aimed at thirty seconds. This, and the fact that we only passed here at midday three years later means I need to return to the glacier lagoon another time, this time at the right time, and opening the shutter for the right amount of time. Hopefully finding cleaner, simpler compositions amongst the icy debris. That’s a lot of things to get right. Seriously – f22? Still, it didn’t put me off having a go at reworking the image.
It seems strange that with so many images from last year’s visit to work on, I’ve found myself returning to the earlier 2019 trip a few times recently. A trip where we raced around in a hurry, seeing everything but seeing so little, barely able to get to grips with a location before moving onto the next one, which might have been a hundred miles or more away. Getting nowhere whatsoever when the clouds descended and hid everything from sight at two of the locations we’d been most excited about. I never felt I’d told the full story of that first visit to Iceland either. And I’m forever learning, trying to improve on the previous edit, hopefully getting somewhere even with such a cluttered scene as this. Will I still be unearthing images from the 2022 adventure in another four years’ time? Probably. Especially as I haven’t even started on so many of them yet. It’s like having a treasure chest that you can keep dipping into, finding images to shake out memories that need to written down, remembered and shared.
So I’ll carry on dusting off those older images, revisiting the raw files and seeing whether I’ve got any further forward in the editing process. After all, if there’s a golden glow over a lagoon full of icebergs to be worked on, it seems the obvious thing to do.