***THE LOVE OF WATER***
View allAll Photos Tagged water_shots
sunset time along the kafue river.
in the eye of this giant Kingfisher (megaceyle maximus-male-) you can see the sun going down in to the water.
shot from a little boat.
kafue national park ,Zambia
original HD file here:
I had to be very careful that my lens and camera don't get wet from the spray and that I didn't slip in the water.Shot in North Wales Snowdonia.
Tossed into Mlýnská Strouha (a.k.a. Mill Ditch pond) in order to break the glassy smoothness of the water. Shot taken near the intersection of Pallova and Pražská in Plzen Czech Republic.
Long exposition of furious water shot in the snow.
We had a lot of rain before the snow and the low temperature, which explains that level of the water.
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Cuddling and grooming each other. A third one joined them, but a big ball of fur does not make much of a picture.
Open water shot taken in autumn.
Another in water shot showcasing the beauty of the Great Salt Lake and the surrounding mountains.
In the water you can see the nice sand texture that I managed to not walk through :-) The mountains around the Great Salt Lake have had very little snow on them, the larger mountains away from the lake have above average snow which is great as that is our water for the rest of the year.
The Great Salt Lake – GPS is not the exact spot of the shot.
A Mute Swan skimming fresh water off the top of this salt water bay. Unfortunately the sun had already set on this section of the bay, so the lighting was a bit tricky, but I must say I'm getting addicted to golden water shots!
(Roberts Bay, BC).
Please don't use this image on websites, blogs, etc. without my permission.
Long exposition of furious water shot in the snow.
We had a lot of rain before the snow and the low temperature, which explains that level of the water.
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Rags having another drink of water. Shot a while ago - now we have had some rain, so the fountain is not as critically needed...
Dushara Tatters and Rags, 30.06.2023.
Olympus OMD EM5 Digital Camera
On our way out of Yosemite, we spotted this small waterfall along highway 120. We decided to turn around and go back and set up to take the picture. We always enjoy getting water shots and it’s always nice to get something off the beaten path rather than the main falls in Yosemite. The slow shutter speed created the look of a silk veil.
Back to terra firma for a bit. Though the lake ice, as expected, left us entirely yesterday, so the beckoning of the canoe will no doubt yield more water shots soon enough. By the way, all the green some of you have been noting is made up entirely of the many conifers abounding in the area.
The scenery was so beautiful; I had to go in the river for a full water shot. I am not sure what was worse the sand flies or the cold water.
A tablespoon measurer rests on a canvas print of a sunset over water.
Shot for Crazy Tuesday, Spoon Reflections
Rather understandably, the steady trickle of visitors that make it to this lonely outpost tend to look in another direction. More often than not they point their cameras and phones in a southerly direction, taking in the grand vista of Haifoss and the huge canyon that leads away towards a distant coast. Here, at the edge of the place where the roads lead to Iceland's mysterious and untamed interior, you can get a sense of being completely alone, or at least you can when you choose to ignore the dozen or so other parties that came here instead of the leading Golden Circle attractions at Gulfoss and Strokkur.
Granni, the companion waterfall to the huge drop of Haifoss, is equally worthy of inspection, set under a grey moody sky against the dark brown slabs cast in sturdy layers of basalt columns. Here, the bright white cascade crashes and contrasts its way through sombre yet handsome tones towards the canyon floor. Contrasting tones that caught my eye and made me feel the shot was worth taking. Words don't really do justice to the sense of being here of course. At a right angle to the central element of your view, the preamble to the main fall is worthy of a capture in its own right, given enough time to explore the area more fully. How close you can get to it without falling into oblivion I can't say, so please don't write in if you or your loved ones suffer an unfortunate moment there.
Quite why we didn't get closer to the base of Granni during our meanderings through the bottom of the canyon tells a tale in itself perhaps. You can never have regrets, but I do wonder at the things we sometimes leave out - in this case driven by the obsession with capturing a focus stack or two from the base of the rainbow clad Haifoss. A few minutes of further clambering would have taken us around a corner and much closer to this beautiful creation by Mother Nature's architectural department at the canyon head. Even on what had been up until then a dry sunny day, we'd have probably taken a bit of a hosing by the competing drifts of spray, but if would have been a soaking worth suffering just to feel the rawness, the remoteness, and the utter grandeur of such a spectacular sight.
It was only after a period of ascent driven oxygen deprivation that we gazed back down towards the browns, greens and greys in front of us, where I took what I then saw as an afterthought - or a record shot as we sometimes like to call the creations that we don't expect to make the light of day. Of course, I took in the big view to the south - the one that features the 128 metre drop of Haifoss and the valley beyond towards the south coast. I have a small collection of raw files from there that might only produce a record shot - but then again you never know. I don't, because they're in one of that majority of untouched folders I mentioned in my last post.
So if you're heading this way and taking your 4 wheel drive across the bumpy track from road 32 to here, don't forget to take in the Lesser Spotted Granni. She's worth pointing your camera at with all manner of focal lengths. You might just be surprised to find an image that you weren't quite expecting on your SD card later.
My attempt at the "Smile on Saturday" theme "oil on water".
I freely admit that I can be very stubborn from time to time... that's why I almost didn't submit any image for this weeks "Smile on Saturday" theme "oil". The reason being, that while I have seen many interesting oil on water shots, I didn't just want to watch a tutorial on how to do that but try it myself. Because I didn't find enough time to really experiment and the first results looked very boring or lacked contrast, I almost stopped my attempts. However one last try netted me some more (hopefully) interesting results, so I'm going to share them. Maybe I'll watch a tutorial in the future and see how it's really done... you never know! 😅
Shot with a Noritsu "32 mm F 4" lens on a Canon EOS R5.
the oil always bubbles to itself and the water cradles it. Shot on a green glass plate, lights under and over, This is my first oil and water shot, definitely no dust to worry with on this but it is never wrecking on every bump will it slosh out.
You guessed it: Just add water! ;-)))
Shot notes: added water, hah. Shot with a 300F4 paired with a 1.4x converter and slightly cropped before enhancement.
Blue Sails Blue Water nice sloop heading up the Intercoastal probably for more open water shot in North Carolina.
Lately I've been having a blast getting surf and wave shots from the water. It combines two of my biggest passions - Photography and Surf. I hope all my fellow bird friends out there enjoy seeing a fresh perspective, because there are more of these shots in the "pipeline".
Have a great weekend everyone!
These birds can fly 200 feet over the water and spot a 6 inch target fish in the water. Shot was taken from the 22nd floor of a condo.
Maybe this was the lull during Super Saturday. Remember Super Saturday? It was the day when the Snaefellsnes peninsula was our world and we explored it royally. From mid morning at Grundarfoss until after sunset under an enormous pink swirling cloud at the black church of Budir we stopped here there and everywhere on a day of maximum input and an output that will have me reaching into the archives for months, possibly years to come. I have no less than eighteen separate folders full of RAW files from that finest of days, some of which contain large numbers of images to pore over, while a few, such as the group I took from a layby on the road to Hellnar have just two or three files, little more than handheld snapshots.
By the time we arrived here, we’d already had a very agreeable few hours at the lesser known Svodufoss on the northwest corner of the peninsula, where we’d bathed in autumnal sunshine under the majestic white peak of Snaefellsjokull. We’d paused briefly to photograph the church of Ingjaldsholl in front of the glacier, before sauntering happily along the remote and empty Utnesvegur, passing a discarded landscape of twisted forms. A crater here, a lava field there. For now we were just driving through the landscape, enjoying the privilege of witnessing this extraordinary peninsula. We’d stop at Arnarstapi and photograph the white house again next, we decided. But for a moment we’d take that side road to Hellnar and pause in the layby for a snack, from where we could gaze down at the church we’d abandoned all intentions of photographing twenty-four hours earlier. I’d seen some very agreeable images of the subject in these pages, but from wherever you looked it was surrounded by clutter, and the most compelling pictures I’d found for reference had been simplified by a blanket of snow. Reluctantly we’d agreed that there probably wasn’t a shot here for this trip. I took a couple of snaps with the long lens and duly filed the results, instantly forgetting the episode as we moved on to the next stop where there was an already tried and tested composition to revisit. The lull was over, and the feeding frenzy of Super Saturday had resumed.
It was only much later, in one of those moments when I decided that while I wanted to play around with some shots in the editing suite, I wasn’t in the mood for sifting through a large number of candidates. I wanted simple, and simple didn’t come easier than a folder with only three RAW files, two of which appeared to be almost identical. The shortlisting would take approximately zero seconds. Maybe I could declutter the space around the church? Another monochrome conversion with a bit of contrast would help to simplify the scene, and perhaps there was an image hidden in plain sight that was worth persevering for. Just a quick half hour before I moved away from the computer and did something else with my Sunday afternoon, I thought to myself. And so I started to tinker, gradually removing one distraction after another with varying degrees of success, until the white church stood alone in its space against the quiet ocean. A dodge, a burn or several, a pair of levels and curves adjustments and the shapes of distant mountains somewhere closer to Reykjavik appeared across the water. Now an image that initially offered little promise began to take shape. It still wasn’t one I planned to share – at least not until the moment that I began to rather like what I was looking at. Somehow, an image had evolved from a messy starting point and I was happy.
It makes me wonder what else I’ve got lying around in my saved files; what images are hovering one step away from the dustbin of eternity that might have a hidden promise just waiting to be hatched from chaos. When there are so many fantastic moments still waiting to be captured, it may be a while before any more of the lesser lights appear, but anything is possible. “Never delete anything – just in case,” seems to be the lesson I’ve learned, not that I often do. You never know when you might see something in an unloved snapshot that you overlooked in the first place.
Bohemian Waxwing (Bombycilla garrulus) resting after a feeding frenzy in the backyard on a Mountain Ash berry crop in suburban Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
5 April, 2015.
Slide # GWB_20150405_0537.CR2
Use of this image on websites, blogs or other media without explicit permission is not permitted.
© Gerard W. Beyersbergen - All Rights Reserved Worldwide In Perpetuity - No Unauthorized Use.
Double-crested Cormorants are large waterbirds with small heads on long, kinked necks. They have thin, strongly hooked bills, roughly the length of the head. Their heavy bodies sit low in the water. Shot from my kayak
Smoky Mountain National Park, Tennessee. Whiitewater below the falls. This is litterally 5 minutes from the parking area at Lynn Camp Prong. Just over the bridge there is a little path on the left that goes down to the water. You need to climb around the rocks a little to get different viewpoints, but this trail provides a lot of opportunities for long exposure water shots.
Im not sure if you would even be able to shoot this shot with more water in the river... but I guess a bit more of a flow would work better... you would need gators though as I was standing up to my ankles in water taking this shot... And it would defo be better first thing in the morning... the afternoon light was too much and as you could see I could do nothing but let the sky blow out... I appreciate some people have it in their skillset to blend exposures together and I can do it for a static landscape using the HDR tool in affinity... but it doesnt work for moving water shots... so I just stick to single exposures! I'll give it another go in the future with more water as I liked the composition ... something a little different from the usual Glencoe shots!
"Yes, that looks like an engine," Dave was looking satisfied as he peered under the bonnet of the car he was thinking about buying - my car in fact. I nodded sagely in agreement. "It does indeed appear to be an engine." I sometimes wonder why we need mechanics when two bumbling amateurs can race so quickly to such conclusive positions as this. I was just pleased to discover that my little Fiat hadn't spent the last ten years being propelled by an enormous rubber band that I might one day have to rewind with an industrial winch and the aid of a championship winning tug of war team. I think that in those ten years I looked underneath the bonnet no more than half a dozen times. Of course nowadays car engines are just boxes under the bonnet that you plug a computer into if you want to make sure everything is OK. Nobody like us can actually work on them anymore. The fact that everyone teases me and calls me "Captain Slow" because I don't drive everywhere at 150 miles per hour has probably helped to keep the last decade of driving completely trouble free.
All of this irrelevance had found me rethinking my weekend plans. I'd promised myself a Saturday evening alone at Godrevy after a long week at work, and I'd promised Ali that once I'd advanced beyond the need to stand on a clifftop pointing a camera at a lighthouse, I'd reserve the rest of the weekend for spending time with her. Now Sunday would be spent finding temporary insurance for a car I'd not driven in five months, a morning valet service and an afternoon trip to the mechanic for the MOT. Knowing I'd need Ali's help for that I suggested we spend Saturday evening together - although in practice that meant me heading off in one direction with the camera and her in the other with the dog. There would be a rendezvous at the car at dusk, and it was accepted that I would be later than I'd said I would be. I'm afraid that usually happens because once I've arrived here; even the fact that night is drawing in doesn't generally deter me from taking one last image - and then another.
I arrived in this spot at high tide, the advancing waves scattering a group of startled oystercatchers from the rocks in front of me. The sea was doing beautiful things in powder blue tones and I took lots of exposures, trying to catch the water pouring of the rocks in the centre ground. It was my first time back here since lockdown and it felt great to be back on my favourite stomping ground.
I have a week off work to look forward to now, so it's inevitable that I'll be here again very soon. It's really not an easy place to tear yourself away from.
Smile on Saturday: "Copy Collage"
Oil and water shot without any color background. Post processed with red, green, blue and orange colors.
You'd think I'd have got the hang of this sort of thing by now. I mean, I've only lived beside the sea for pretty much my entire existence after all. We get monstrous ocean waves like this every winter. Plenty of opportunities to hide under the duvet...........erm I mean venture out into the elements in my wellies and sou'wester, to face the latest sou'wester that the Atlantic has sent over and attempt to capture the excitement. But every time I've tried, I've come away feeling disappointed at myself. Surely it can't be that difficult to struggle out of the car, point the camera at a huge thundering wave, take a couple of snaps and then go home to dabble about in Lightroom and Photoshop can it?
Last time I attempted to photograph big waves was in Lanzarote in November. I fact I think I've a shot worth sharing from that adventure, taken, yes again using the 100-400. I'll come back to that one later. Prior to that, I have to go back in time to one Saturday lunchtime precisely twelve months, when Storm Arwen, the first of that winter season arrived and attempted to batter down our front doors. Over a two hour period on the beach at Portreath I took almost six hundred handheld frames, mostly in burst mode. When I got home and worked on them, even those that were taken in bright sunshine looked positively anaemic in the final edits. Eventually I posted "The Sorcerer and the Sea," a huge tower of spray to the west of Gull Rock giving the image its title. The sorcerer himself was such an extraordinary sight that I had to post the image and story, but in truth I wasn't at all happy with the edit. The foreground wave had no contrast at all, no matter how I tried to lift it, and a further crop was going to bring the base of Gull Rock too close to the border of the image for my liking. "Publish and be damned." One of those - there was a story to be told, and a mass of white spray that seemed almost unbelievable. Otherwise, I would have consigned it to the bin and forgotten it.
But just recently, something made me want to revisit the wave images from that day. With another year of education in the editing suite behind me, I felt sure I could do something to improve the contrast in particular. This was the first image I decided I'd attempt to remaster (or re-bungle) and after a certain amount of pushing and pulling with a considerable number of layer masks I felt I was getting somewhere at last. Finally it seemed I had managed to darken the sky without affecting the crest of the wave too noticeably, and finally I was managing to bring out the contrast needed to make the image pop. Maybe, just maybe the lessons I'd learned from Mads' online Photoshop course were starting to bear some fruit. It needed a heavy crop, but then again I never knew about high pass filters and Topaz noise reduction layers before. Even at 400mm on the crop body that wave seemed to be a long way away. I tried a further edit of the Sorcerer and the Sea, but I still can't get it to work - neither in colour nor in black and white. More practice needed then.
In fact we're still waiting for a big hoolie to hit the coast here this winter, but I'm holding out my hopes for February. That's when it usually gets a bit interesting as the tail end of winter ramps up and delivers its last assaults. Like the errant schoolboy with the disappointing report, I'm hoping to make a better impression next time. But wave photography remains a bit of a mystery, that I'm still attempting to unravel. It doesn't help that down the road resides the finest exponent of ocean wave photography I know in the form of one Mark Dobson - or Wild Seascapes as his moniker goes. Mark is a genius at this stuff. So highly regarded is he by those in the lofty plains of YouTube, that Nigel Danson recently featured his work one Sunday morning. Sadly, Mark doesn't have a presence on Flickr, but you can find him on Vero and Instagram under "Wild Seascapes." I'd love to know where he stands to get such extraordinary side on images to such huge storm waves without needing a frogman's outfit and a waterproof camera, but I'm always struck dumb by the quality of his results. I guess if I keep on trying I can only get a little bit closer to the gold standard. Bronze standard will do to be honest. Just need a storm of two to pass by and a thermos full of coffee on hand, and away we go again.
Mark's website: www.wildseascapes.co.uk/
The Sorcerer and the Sea : www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/51710521748/in/datepo...
This proud Drake, as he has just fathered ducklings, appears to be standing on his reflection. Actually he is standing on a rock that is only about 1/4 inch below the surface of the water.
Shot with a Tameron 100-400mm lens.
Another edit of an old Cardiff Bay upload. I love these low angle water shots.
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Long exposition of furious water shot in the snow.
We had a lot of rain before the snow and the low temperature, which explains that level of the water.
Please visit my other gallery :
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One of my attempts at the "Smile on Saturday" theme "oil on water".
I freely admit that I can be very stubborn from time to time... that's why I almost didn't submit any image for this weeks "Smile on Saturday" theme "oil". The reason being, that while I have seen many interesting oil on water shots, I didn't just want to watch a tutorial on how to do that but try it myself. Because I didn't find enough time to really experiment and the first results looked very boring or lacked contrast, I almost stopped my attempts. However one last try netted me some more (hopefully) interesting results, so I'm going to share them. Maybe I'll watch a tutorial in the future and see how it's really done... you never know! 😅
Shot with a Noritsu "45 mm F 4" (enlarging) lens on a Canon EOS R5.
The Crazy Tuesday came up on me too fast, this is the only water shot for the week but I think it goes with the Crazy Tuesday theme "Water"
Tried some 'alternative lighting' on this oil and water shot with coloured LED's but they didn't really have the power to create the effect I really wanted!
Taken in a plastic Trifle container that we had for desert!
HMM! Theme: Oil and Water
I haven't done an oil and water shot for a long time and had to have a few tries before I began to get reasonable results. I like the pastel colours in this one.
121 pictures in 2021 (64) oil and water
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I returned from running my winter workshop on Skye on Wednesday and while I would have liked a little more light than we got (bar an amazing sunrise on the Sunday at the Quiraing), subdued conditions do make for some fantastic opportunities to capture water shots as bright light often burns out the water.
On this particular day, I took my fellow photographers up to the Fairy Pools, which for those of you who know, is a truly stunning part of Skye and quite easily the most impressive stretch of river anywhere in the UK.
Under water arches, iridescent green plunge pools and of course the numerous waterfalls that line the Glen Brittle river all go to make this one of my favourite locations in the UK. On this visit, I had a little time to find and capture some different compositions on a familiar subject matter and this gorgeous little rock and water section fitted the bill perfectly.
Canon EOS R
Canon 16-35mm f4 @18mm
f16
2 secs
ISO320
Nisi Polariser
Nisi 8 Stop ND Filter
Benro TMA48CXL Mach 3 Tripod
Benro GD3WH Geared Head
3 Legged Thing QR11-LC L Bracket
Mindshift Backlight 26L Bag
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Happy Wednesday MY Friends .. Hope Your Week Is Going Fabulous ..
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The day we moved to base camp three was always going to be a bit of an adventure. Now I look back at the notes, which confirm how long the journey was, especially in a land where the speed limits are positively pedestrian. From the Efra Sel Hostel at Fludir in the Golden Circle, we'd be driving 439km, or for five and a half hours as Google Maps informed me, eventually reaching the loneliest outpost of the trip at Stafafell Cottages, roughly halfway between the highlights on the road from Vestrahorn to Eystrahorn. Once we'd thrown in a lunch stop at Vik and decided upon which of the many interim attractions we'd visit along the way, an extra three hours or more would be added to the long day of driving ahead. We even pulled very briefly into a rammed car park at Skogafoss, just for a recce rather than anything more immersive at this stage. Here we were greeted by a rainbow that spread itself across the base of the waterfall, much as the one at Haifoss had done the day before. But unlike the far more remote Haifoss, the space was full of people, so much so that we didn't even take the cameras out of the packs. I don't think I even bothered with a phone snap.
Driving from west to east along the south coast of Iceland is an experience you're unlikely to forget, especially on a clear day when the landscape opens up ahead of you in full glorious technicolour. The further you proceed, the more magnificent it seems to become as on the left hand side mountains emerge from the horizon to greet you, ever more foreboding as you go. On this clear sunny day, we were only a few minutes out of Vik before the Vatnajokull glacier, which covers eight percent of the entire surface of Iceland rose to beckon us across the plains ahead, where it sat for the better part of two hours as we slowly reeled it in towards us. As we made the final approach, the long icy fingers of Skaftafell and Svinafellsjokull reached down towards the ground from their peaks to say hello, inviting us to stop at the latter, a decision mainly driven by the fact that we didn't have to pay to park there.
Back on the road, resisting the temptation to stop as the tell-tale single span suspension bridge announced we were passing the glacier lagoon at Jokulsarlon, we pressed on, fully in the knowledge that the chances of a sunset shoot were rapidly diminishing. It was a situation made ever more frustrating by the arrival of what might have been the most appealing golden hour we'd had so far. The last hour brought soft warm tones to the front lit mountains ahead, by which time we knew the only opportunity we'd get that evening was to head straight down the track to Batman's lair.
I'd only discovered the existence of Brunnhorn after booking our accommodation, so I was delighted to see that a lesser known highlight of the region was quite literally just across the road from our home for the next four nights. At this moment I'm going to allow you to pause for a period of up to seven nanoseconds while you attempt to deduce for yourself why it's commonly know as "Batman Mountain." Got it? We'll move on then. As you can see, by the time we finally got to our spot, we had moved convincingly into the depths of the blue hour, and although we still weren't quite over the disappointment of not having arrived even fifteen minutes earlier, there was still a shot waiting to be stolen from the approaching night. In the stillness of the evening, a long exposure delivered the reflections and soft peachy tones of the horizon that made the moment one worth recording.
In retrospect, I'm now quite content that we didn't arrive here with enough time to go elsewhere. We'd have probably pushed on to Eystrahorn, where we spent the following afternoon and evening with a degree of success. Although we came back here a couple of times as an aperitif to the main events at either Eystrahorn or Vestrahorn that would follow, I'm not so sure we'd have dedicated an entire evening shoot to it. So, in this way, Batman had his moment in the spotlight, bathed in blue reflections before the dusk vanished into darkness. After all, there's always a positive to be found when you reflect on things later.
Down by the Sea, a close-up of a wave hitting the shore at Dunwich Beach, Suffolk, England, UK. Taken with a GoPro wearable camera I like the angle looking down the wave and the boat on the shore beyond.
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Of course I knew exactly what I was going to see. Half a dozen or more YouTube feeds had prepared me for the view, and beyond that quite a few of you had evidently been here too. And even by Iceland’s celebrity A list standards, this was a location that I knew was going to have my eyes springing from their sockets and bouncing about on the ground like table tennis balls. Arriving here in July as we did, most visitors were standing just to the left at the spot where the nearest puffin activity was taking place a few yards further away, which did at least mean that despite the numbers present, there wasn’t a jostle of togs trying to shoot the epic view in front of them.
By now, Lee and I had driven most of the 1,100 odd miles around the ring road in our rented bright yellow VW camper, to which you can add the Snaefellsnes detour. Great swathes of the north and east of the country had been bypassed on an eternally dreary and damp afternoon in our eagerness to get to the south coast and its collection of landscape jewels. Only the previous morning we’d waited in hope at Eystrahorn, over two hundred miles to the east, and then Vestrahorn before heading into the small town of Hofn for supplies. Both locations had remained elusive, making themselves completely invisible under grey shrouds and foiling our ambitions completely. From there we’d headed west to overnight beside the unworldly Jokulsarlon glacier lagoon and take photographs among the chunks of ice washed back onto the black sands of Diamond Beach at midnight under an endless veil of soft rain. The following morning we continued west, to a place where we joined the crowds on the narrow footpaths above the canyon of Fjadrarglufur before arriving sometime later in the small metropolis of Vik, hungry, tired, excited, and brimming with aromas that made other humans maintain their distance. By now, we were in a condition that only two middle aged unchecked males can achieve after five days on the road, and made straight for the local swimming pool to shower and wallow in the warm water, contemplating the eminence of Reynisfjall in front of us. Later, rested, watered and decidedly less pungent, we wandered onto the beach to photograph the stacks from the east, before hiking up the mountain to see what we could see from the top. In fact we took a picture or two while we were up there as well. Talk about whistle stop adventures! Twenty-two hours of daylight certainly gives you the chance to take a lot of photos, that’s for sure.
Even after that the day’s activities still had one final outing lying in wait as we drove a few miles further west to stand on the clifftop at Dyrholaey from where we could gaze happily at the vista before us. That classic view, so often photographed was about to become the subject of yet another viewfinder or two. In the foreground stood the Shrek-like monolith of Arnardrangur, the white tide washing lazily across the sand and around its imposing circumference. At the other end of the long black strip of Reynisfjara were the outlandish and huge sea stacks of Reynisdrangar, they in turn dwarfed by the enormous flat shelf of land jutting out into the ocean that we’d climbed just a few hours earlier. With a time machine we might have seen ourselves a mile or two away, squinting back into the low sun. For a while we watched the puffins and planned a pit stop here for the following day with the long lenses. Everyone loves a puffin don’t they? You can see mine in this album if you feel moved to do so. No pressure, but our hero does have a beak full of sand eels; just saying.
And those two paragraphs pretty much encapsulate the experience of our first trip to Iceland three summers ago. Non stop driving interspersed with non stop photography and only a couple of visits to the pool complex at Vik and a strangely spontaneous whale watching trip out of the handsome harbour of Husavik to break the rhythm. In a single week we managed to come away with images from more than twenty locations, some of them successful missions, others abject failures. Add to this the album full of random phone snapshots from downtown Reykjavik to the subarctic northern bays of Akureyri and Husavik; from the remote sulphurous moonscape of Hverir in the northeast of nowhere to the random red chair by the roadside near Hofn. I often look back at those rapidly composed phone snaps and grin at the memories. It’s the way of things when you only have a week and there are so many things you daren’t miss. We had at least managed to visit every place on the itinerary we’d made and agreed upon, and found a couple of unexpected gems to add to it too.
And now, Iceland awaits our return visit. This time we have double the days available and rather fewer miles to cover. With four bases there will be opportunities to return to some favoured locations at least once or twice, and catch them in different moods. As before, a list of beauty spots has been drafted, some of them brand new, while others will come forward to greet us like old acquaintances. Beside the utter failures of Eystrahorn and Vestrahorn in the south east, there are places where justice wasn’t fully done as we rushed hither and thither across the barren yet bewildering landscape. Kirkjufell – what on earth was I up to there? Need to do better this time. And then there are places like this, where I was happy enough with the image I came away with, but I’m in no doubt that there are more compositions to be had both on and around this headland. Maybe we’ll even manage to drag ourselves out early enough to capture a sunrise here.
And do you know what? We might even get to see the aurora. Of course lots of non togs assume that's all we're going for, although in truth we'd barely considered it. But it's very much a possibility in September so the books tell us. I even know which website to check now. I’d better start practising some night time photography again then. Now then, focus manually on the distant lamppost………….
I don't think I'll ever feel that business is complete at any location. Not even at the so often photographed lighthouse at Godrevy, eleven miles down the road that appears in a disproportionate percentage of my posts as well as the avatar I use here and elsewhere. I'll never capture the perfect shot- and if somehow that happened, I suspect some form of disillusionment would follow - but at the same time there are pictures that make us happy as we develop them into a pleasing final result. Especially so when we return to a place for the second time to find the star of the show has actually bothered to put in an appearance. As Lee said to a fellow tog on the beach here "Well I've been to Vestrahorn twice, but this is the first time I've seen it." The young English photographer apparently furrowed his brow questioningly, waiting for a further explanation. "When we came here in 2019, the entire mountain range was covered in a blanket of cloud that went all the way down to ground level," Lee continued. "We stayed here for about three hours, hoping things might change, but they only got worse, and we needed to move on."
Lee's retold tale took us back to what was without question the most disappointing episode of that whistle stop tour three years earlier, the only other visit either of us had made to Iceland when we'd circled the entire country in a bright yellow VW campervan named Brian. The day beforehand we'd driven from the far north for hours and hours through increasingly bad weather and disappearing visibility. The mysterious southeast corner between Egilsstadir and Djupivogur remained almost entirely a mystery, the occasional hint of untouched fjord looming silently out of the mist as we made our way south. We arrived at Eystrahorn, just forty minutes away to spend the small hours hoping for a change in the weather, but the morning only delivered more of the same. And when you're attempting to encircle a nation of this size in six days where road conditions and speed limits are designed to keep progress at the steadiest of paces, you can only give a location so much time before you have to move on. By the time we arrived at Vestrahorn and paid the entrance fee to get down to the celebrated viewpoint we'd dreamed of seeing for so long, its total absence from the scene was received in the manner of a firm blow being delivered to the solar plexus. We weren't happy. Ironically, I did eventually turn the camera around to take what was later received on Flickr as one of the most successful images from the trip in "The Life of Brian." I've shamelessly added a link to the bottom of this story as a plug. Later, we moved on to Hofn and then to Jokulsarlon glacier lagoon and Diamond Beach, which happily delivered happier results.
So if nothing else happened on this return to the scene, what we wanted to do was actually see Vestrahorn in all of its magnificence. Whether we'd get any worthwhile images under such a bland sky was a question in point, but as we were staying nearby for four nights, we'd get at least a couple of stabs at laying the spectre of that July morning 2019 to rest. The sense of anticipation in the car as we made our way along the sometimes bumpy track from the main road was infinitely palpable. Every corner turned found us expecting to see the iconic view at last, but what we hadn't realised was that you can only really see Vestrahorn once you head out over the causeway towards the dunes. If we'd had a glimpse on the previous expedition we'd have known that. "Where is it?" I screeched excitedly as I drove slightly more urgently than I should have done. "Have they moved it since last time, just to annoy us?"
Of course, it was there. Why after all would the custodians remove it when they do such a roaring trade charging entrants 900kr a head for the pleasure of seeing the place. We can all rant about being charged to stare at a mountain range, but I find that if you've done your research and know the only way you're going to get a good view is to reconcile yourself to the fact you'll be parting with cash to do so, it at least makes things easier. In fact, we happily parted with the fee on two consecutive days to be here, and I've no doubt we'd have gone again given the time to do so. After all, what a place it is when you finally get to see the mountain range that's featured in countless images for yourself. If there were architecture prizes for natural landscapes, this one would definitely be on a shortlist for a major prize. And when you do arrive, you're immediately faced with so many opportunities. You can shoot reflections over a tidal lagoon, or you can choose a golden grassed dune to perch upon or behind as you try to eliminate the billion footprints on the volcanic black sand. You can zoom in to only include one part of the range, but it would be rude not to take the wide angle lens and consign the entire majesty of it to your SD card. And then you can head down to the water and shoot the incoming tide as big sweeps of white water leave streaks across the shoreline. I could happily spend days here, learning the location and capturing it in every imaginable mood. Even the fact that every tog in southeast Iceland will be competing for elbow room here with you as the light intensifies seems tolerable to me. As I stood in this spot, opening the shutter again and again, earning a welly boot full of seawater for my efforts, I was surrounded by a collection of clackers from across the globe, each seemingly lost in their own happy worlds. Some would smile in the knowledge that they were spending hard earned precious time in one of the world's great photography meccas, while others stood behind their tripods with fixed expressions, knowing this might be their only chance to return from this magical land with an image worthy of their wall or their online gallery.
In this image, which was the sixteenth edition of the original, I found myself sacrificing the immediate foreground drama continued by that big sweep of seawater, by cropping the bottom of the shot to bring the viewer closer into the scene. It definitely falls into the "best viewed large" category, so I hope you've switched the computer on to take a closer look. The almost featureless sky was rescued by a yellow sunset glow to the west, while a couple of tufts nestled pleasingly atop the highest peaks on Vestrahorn. And that foreground wash of water towards me made the shot an easy selection from the many I took of this wide angle view. I've got to confess I'm pretty pleased with the result, and the ghost of 2019 has been happily banished from the back catalogue of despondency. Vestrahorn had made its peace and repaid us for that dismal afternoon three years ago. Happy? Well, yes, I rather think I am this time.
The Life of Brian -
www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/49476904751/in/album-...