Frozen Life Forms
Beneath the vatnajökull glacier on Iceland's south coast incredible ice caves are carved by the waters flowing through and beneath the vast tongue of ice. As scientific understanding of this frozen world deepens, we begin to see that life survives even after being frozen in time for thousands of years. It even thrives in the waters underneath: icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/nature_and_travel/2017/07/10/r...
Kevin Benedict and I had the incredible experience of exploring the ice caves, led by the fantastic guides from Blue Iceland - blueiceland.is on an unforgettable visit in 2018. Deep inside the glacier I was mesmerized by the forms, textures and otherworldly glow coming from within the ice. At times it felt almost organic, like being inside an unimaginably large alien creature (yes, I have an active imagination and I watch and read too much Sci-Fi). With our recent understanding of the vast amount of bacteria, viruses and other microscopic life that lies within the ice, this may not be entirely inaccurate! I've already posted a couple other pictures from the ice cave, so I may be starting to get repetitive here, but this is possibly my favorite picture from the entire trip. I know abstracts aren't everyone's cup of tea, but the forms, the almost oily texture, the color and the glow of this particular surface within the cave made me almost giddy, and the fact that I was able to capture this surprisingly well in camera delights me to no end. It was *not* an easy photo to take as it was a rather tight space, and quite deep within the cave, so it required some sucking in of the tummy and rather complicated arranging of tripod and camera. I couldn't get the visual alignment quite as square as I would have liked but I was happy to get any shot at all (and astounded that the camera was able to find focus in such a dark place). I was also *very* relieved once I had the shot and was able to extricate myself and move back out to less claustrophobic conditions. So I know that few others will have the same emotional reaction to this icy abstract that I do and that's ok with me, this image brings me immense personal satisfaction and some good memories of being forced out of my comfort zone to experience something truly unique.
My camera, which I dearly love and has served me brilliantly, nonetheless has some flaws. The sensor is well known to have hot spot issues with longer epxosure shots. The same Sony sensor is used by both the Nikon D810 and Pentax K-1. Nikon provided a fix for this issue once it became evident (photographylife.com/news/nikon-confirms-the-d810-thermal-...), but Pentax chose to fix it via software, so the K-1 provides a hot-spot removal option on long exposure shots, which is effectively implemented as a two-phase shot where the camera takes the same image again with the shutter closed, finds all the non-black pixels and then subtracts them or some such thing. Anyway, this is ok BUT I don't use it that often in practice because it adds a large amount of in-camera processing time to an already long shot. Keep in mind I almost always shoot with Pentax's "Pixel Shift" mode which takes 4 shots moving the sensor 1 pixel between each shot and then combining them together to get improved sharpness, dynamic range and color fidelity. Pixel Shift proved an absolute technological god-send in the darkness of the ice caves allowing me to lift the shadows by 2 additional stops without adding noise. But now you have a shot which is already a 30 second exposure X 4, so two full minutes of exposure time. Adding the automatic in-camera hot spot reduction would've taken each shot to nearly 5 minutes (!). That's a long time to be hanging around in a dark cramped nook of a cave below a few million tons of ice. So to finally come to the point of this story, I didn't use the hot spot reduction. And it's a dark long-exposure shot. So there were a lot of hot spots I found in this image and it took hours of cloning to remove the 200+ hot spots from the resulting image. And I may not have found them all.
Frozen Life Forms
Beneath the vatnajökull glacier on Iceland's south coast incredible ice caves are carved by the waters flowing through and beneath the vast tongue of ice. As scientific understanding of this frozen world deepens, we begin to see that life survives even after being frozen in time for thousands of years. It even thrives in the waters underneath: icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/nature_and_travel/2017/07/10/r...
Kevin Benedict and I had the incredible experience of exploring the ice caves, led by the fantastic guides from Blue Iceland - blueiceland.is on an unforgettable visit in 2018. Deep inside the glacier I was mesmerized by the forms, textures and otherworldly glow coming from within the ice. At times it felt almost organic, like being inside an unimaginably large alien creature (yes, I have an active imagination and I watch and read too much Sci-Fi). With our recent understanding of the vast amount of bacteria, viruses and other microscopic life that lies within the ice, this may not be entirely inaccurate! I've already posted a couple other pictures from the ice cave, so I may be starting to get repetitive here, but this is possibly my favorite picture from the entire trip. I know abstracts aren't everyone's cup of tea, but the forms, the almost oily texture, the color and the glow of this particular surface within the cave made me almost giddy, and the fact that I was able to capture this surprisingly well in camera delights me to no end. It was *not* an easy photo to take as it was a rather tight space, and quite deep within the cave, so it required some sucking in of the tummy and rather complicated arranging of tripod and camera. I couldn't get the visual alignment quite as square as I would have liked but I was happy to get any shot at all (and astounded that the camera was able to find focus in such a dark place). I was also *very* relieved once I had the shot and was able to extricate myself and move back out to less claustrophobic conditions. So I know that few others will have the same emotional reaction to this icy abstract that I do and that's ok with me, this image brings me immense personal satisfaction and some good memories of being forced out of my comfort zone to experience something truly unique.
My camera, which I dearly love and has served me brilliantly, nonetheless has some flaws. The sensor is well known to have hot spot issues with longer epxosure shots. The same Sony sensor is used by both the Nikon D810 and Pentax K-1. Nikon provided a fix for this issue once it became evident (photographylife.com/news/nikon-confirms-the-d810-thermal-...), but Pentax chose to fix it via software, so the K-1 provides a hot-spot removal option on long exposure shots, which is effectively implemented as a two-phase shot where the camera takes the same image again with the shutter closed, finds all the non-black pixels and then subtracts them or some such thing. Anyway, this is ok BUT I don't use it that often in practice because it adds a large amount of in-camera processing time to an already long shot. Keep in mind I almost always shoot with Pentax's "Pixel Shift" mode which takes 4 shots moving the sensor 1 pixel between each shot and then combining them together to get improved sharpness, dynamic range and color fidelity. Pixel Shift proved an absolute technological god-send in the darkness of the ice caves allowing me to lift the shadows by 2 additional stops without adding noise. But now you have a shot which is already a 30 second exposure X 4, so two full minutes of exposure time. Adding the automatic in-camera hot spot reduction would've taken each shot to nearly 5 minutes (!). That's a long time to be hanging around in a dark cramped nook of a cave below a few million tons of ice. So to finally come to the point of this story, I didn't use the hot spot reduction. And it's a dark long-exposure shot. So there were a lot of hot spots I found in this image and it took hours of cloning to remove the 200+ hot spots from the resulting image. And I may not have found them all.