Category: Natural Photography

Iceland, the very name causes a shiver as you conger up a view of this harsh and rugged country. Located midway between Scotland and Greenland between the North Atlantic and the Sea of Greenland, this island nation is a relic of Nordic exploration and conquest. 

We were fortunate to visit Iceland in September 2014 for a 2 1/2 week photo shoot. Seeing an entire country the size of Kentucky (or half the size of Wyoming) in a short time requires significant advanced planning. After reading the tour guides, searching the web, and speaking with two friends who each visited more than once, we decided to rent a small RV so we could haul gear and stay at a location to shoot in the evening, night, and early morning allowing us to travel between sites during the mid-day. It was a perfect choice.

Because of our short time table and the fact that an active volcano threatened to close a large portion of the island, we chose to limit our travel to the south coast, the western peninsula, and the north coast skipping the east and northeast coasts and the remote north western peninsula. It took only a few minutes of driving to realize that this rural, volcanic land gave visitors opportunities to visit small villages with tiny churches, majestic coast lines, towering waterfalls, mountains, and huge glaciers all in a couple of hundred miles of driving.

Wild rivers and streams with spectacular waterfalls are literally everywhere in Iceland, not just the dozens of named falls that are popular tourist attractions but hundreds of unnamed falls that are equally magnificent. Nearly every farm in the sparsely populated agricultural areas is at the base of its own waterfall.  When planning a photographic visit one needs to think of camera and wide angle lenses but also a good tripod, neutral density filters, and cable shutter release for dreamy, long-exposure shots.

Iceland is not a place with abundant wildlife so a long telephoto lens is not necessary. However, at certain times of the year sea birds are common so an avid avian photographer might want to bring the long glass. The beautiful Icelandic ponies and the hilarious, overly hirsute sheep may be other reasons to bring a moderate telephoto lens.

In addition to the rugged landscape and many waterfalls, I wanted to capture the harsh glaciers and a unique freshwater lagoon of icebergs calving from the Vatnajökulsþjóðgarður glacier. Yes, Icelandic is a difficult language (!) but nearly everyone speaks perfect English.

The last item on my shooting list was almost too much to hope for, the Northern lights. As luck would have it, cold, rainy, windy weather prevailed almost the entire trip but by totally dumb luck and no planning or forethought, we found ourselves camped at the iceberg lagoon on the night of a full moon and relatively clear skies. I hoped to capture the bergs by moonlight. After some early test shots I went to bed for a few hours and awoke at midnight. I put on about 5 layers to survive the wind and frigid temperatures and stumbled out of the RV with a full pack of gear for night photography. I shot the full moon over the landscape and the lagoon and then set out to capture the bergs in the cold blue water. After about 20 minutes of shooting my eyes had finally adjusted to the light and I notices strange clouds in the northern sky.  The clouds were actually a phenomenal aurora borealis.

Our trip was complete – great hiking, mountains, glaciers, rivers, waterfalls, and the northern lights.

Plan your trip, Icelandic Airlines has direct flights from Denver and the east coast at very reasonable cost. The people are friendly, the scenery beautiful, and the variety of photographic opportunities is amazing.

For many more images in color and monochrome, please check out the Iceland gallery on this site.

Have you ever dreamed about a lovely vacation shooting photos in an exotic location? What is it really like on assignment for a focused, extended photo shoot? I was fortunate to be able to take a multi-week photography assignment in the beautiful spring desert of southern Utah. During the shoot I tried to record activity, conditions, and details of the shooting.  I was on the road for 39 days – 3 for logistics and 36 for travel and shooting. I visited 5 National Parks, 5 National Monuments, 5 National Forests, 4 state parks, 2 scenic byways, 3 scenic back ways, and several undesignated public lands. The total travel was over 4,000 miles – 1,520 in the RV and 2610 in the Jeep – or about 106 miles per day.  I camped in 9 different locations and based the shooting time out of these campgrounds.

Sounds like a lot of fun, right? I was up every day between 4 and 6 AM with the exception of three travel days when I slept-in until about 6:30. While there were good night sky conditions on 9 nights (25%) I had only three night shoots lasting until 11 PM or midnight but this was partially because of the weather. On most days I tried to shoot between around 5 or 6 AM and 10 AM and, often, again between 4 and 9 PM for the best lighting conditions.

Conditions are variable, at best, in the spring desert. On 23 of the nights (64%) the temperature dropped below 35 degrees but that was easy to handle with proper clothing.  The big problem was late afternoon and evening overcast and wind. On 21 of the days (58%) the wind was consistently above 20 mph. On 18 of the days (50%) gusts were above 30 mph. During one dawn shoot the wind in Dead Horse Point State Park was gusting to 57 mph and the temperature at the dawn shoot was 28 degrees – the joys of photography. With gusts to over 50 mph, I could barely keep my tripod upright, much less stable for long-exposure shots.

Good weather is also a problem for a photographer. The skies were gray and overcast during all of the day on 7 days (19%) but actually stormy on only one day (3%.) The sky was a boring, robin egg blue on 23 days (64%) making mid-day photography unproductive. There were “good” clouds on only 5 days (14%.)

As far as photography goes, I shot a total of 4,569 shots during the 36 days of shooting or about 152 shots per day. I had no quota and tried to be relatively selective but yet capture multiple shots of each compelling subject. While I brought my usual cascade of gear including 3 camera bodies, 7 lenses from 17 to 600mm, 2 tripods, 3 light sources (strobe, ring, and LED), multiple filters, plus the usual spare batteries, memory cards, laptop, external hard drive, and endless connectors, I didn’t shoot a single shot with the crop-sensor cameras or the lenses from 300-600mm. This is strange because in my usual wildlife photography around Jackson, I shoot about two-thirds of my shots with a crop sensor body and the 400-600mm lenses. What a difference for landscape work. I shot 3696 shots (81%) using a 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom, 275 shots (6%) with a 17-40mm f/4 wide-angle zoom, 270 shots (6%) with a 70-200mm f/2.8 short telephoto zoom, and the final 328 shots (7%) with the 70-200mm and a 1.4x teleconverter.

On the trip I visited Arches, Canyonlands (Island in the Sky and the Needles districts), Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, and Grand Canyon (north rim) National Parks. The national monuments visited included Natural Bridges, Grand Staircase Escalante, Vermilion Cliffs, Cedar Breaks, and Pipe Springs. The Utah state parks included Dead Horse Point, Newspaper Rock, Coral Pink Sand Dunes, and Kodachrome Basin.  The scenic drives between locations could be destinations in themselves.  I will be placing images of each of the locations in the Galleries under the National Parks and Public Lands tab on this website.

Despite the high winds and cold conditions, it was an experience of a lifetime.  Southern Utah and northern Arizona have together the largest concentration of National Parks, Monuments, and other public lands of any place in the world. While conditions are unbearable for much of the summer and variable during other months, the panoramic vistas, amazing rock formations and bewildering array of flora will provide a desert experience second to none.

I have commented previously about the time spent at a computer in our world of high-resolution digital photography. When I am not out shooting, I am often in the office in Jackson, Wyoming at the computer importing, tweaking, categorizing, editing, and backing up large numbers of digital images.  One of the first things I learned was don’t try to do this on your average laptop.

Today’s high-end digital cameras produce raw file images that easily exceed 25 – 40 megabytes per image. Large multi-layer edits and specialized combined images, like panoramas, can easily kick the file size up to 100 or 200 megabytes or even a gigabyte in size. Handling these huge files takes some serious computing power.

My recommendation for an office / studio computer for high volume editing is a traditional tower computer – usually a high speed model designed for gaming. These gaming PCs have high power processors, lots of memory, a dedicated video processor with additional memory, and high speed peripheral ports to external devices. My office system is based around such a gaming PC and is shown on the cover photo of this post.

Let’s take a look at some of the specs needed to handle today’s large files and editing software. I have a CyperPower PC available from many gaming PC distributors. The heart of this monster is a 4.33 MHz dual-core processor accessing 16 GB of RAM and driving a high speed video card with an additional 2 GB of memory. This is a good kick-start but the real accelerator in the system is a solid-state drive (SSD) that houses all of the operating system and all software. The SSD is between 4 and 10 times faster than the best mechanical hard drive and the speed is evident when you are opening large files. There is a Blu-Ray DVD / CD drive for loading software and burning preview disks for clients.  The traditional 2 TB internal hard drive and 3 cooling fans completes the guts of the tower.

I have chosen USB-3 peripherals. You can use fire-wire and other proprietary connections but I like the ease of use and wide compatibility of the USB connectors. The tower has 2 USB-3s in front and 4 in back along with a few USB-2s for I/O devices like keyboards and tablets.  I chose Logitech wireless wave keyboard and wireless 4-button / wheel mouse for general input and control of the machine. Another port is used for a high speed card reader for my CF and HSSD camera cards.

Also using the USB-3 connectors are a series of external hard drives for back-up and additional archiving of images. I use a pair of 4 TB primary back-up drives, a 2 TB travel drive, and a 1T drive with the SSD image just in case this highly reliable device should fail or be corrupted. Another option is a RAID drive with automatic dual-drive back-up. It is on my wish list but the high cost and lack of higher capacity make me stick with the twin 4 TB externals. When a 16 GB RAID device is available at a reasonable cost, that will be the way to go.

The main editing interfaces are a pair of 27″ ViewSonic high resolution monitors linked by HDMI to the PC. Two large monitors are almost essential to efficient editing. When I am working in Adobe LightRoom, I use the keyboard/mouse with the interface on the right-hand monitor and a full-screen image on the left-hand monitor. This saves constant switching back and forth to full-screen views after each edit. When I need to open PhotoShop for more advanced pixel-level editing, it comes up on the right-hand monitor above the Wacom Intuos-5 digital tablet.  I simply angle my chair a little to the left and pick up the stylus and I am ready to go. When I save the edited image, it drops back into LightRoom on the right-hand monitor and I am ready to move on.

In a nutshell, the keys for efficient digital editing are a high speed processor with lots of RAM and plenty of external disk space for back-ups. Meticulous cataloging and key wording of images and daily back-up of your work should allow you to stay in the field shooting and minimize your time at the computer.