America Seen Through the Window of a Moving Car
America Seen Through the Window of a Moving Car by Karsten Stanley Andersen on Exposure
I’m not a bird photographer (but swans are awesome)
I’m losing track of how many times I have been out in nature taking pictures when passers-by have stopped, looked in the direction that my camera was pointing, and asked, “What are you looking at?” In most cases, it turns out that what they are actually asking is, “What rare bird have you spotted?”
To most people, a middle-aged man carrying a “real” camera (as in, not a cell phone) in nature means that he is a bird photographer. The concept of just taking a picture of the landscape, or a tree, or a creek is apparently very foreign to the average person. At least, they seem quite surprised when I explain it to them, and they quickly move on. Not interested.
And it’s not that I don’t see the point of bird photography. I would love to be a great bird photographer, but 1) I can’t tell a seagull from an eagle, 2) I don’t have the patience required, and 3) I can’t afford the lenses bird photography calls for. The last point should be a dead giveaway to those who think I’m a bird photographer. How could I possibly be a bird photographer when the lens attached to my camera is a 300 mm at best? Don’t people know that you need at least a 400 mm lens for that?
Now, all this doesn’t mean that I haven’t been known to push the release button if a bird happens to enter my focus area and that I haven’t taken some fairly awesome photos featuring birds. I believe I have. And there is one bird that is an exception to everything I have just said about me and bird photography: swans. While you cannot call me a bird photographer, I would definitely categorize myself as a swan photographer. I love swans. They are some of the most beautiful and most photogenic animals on the planet. Especially the kind that you find in my neck of the woods: the mute swan. It also happens to be the national bird of Denmark, and I for one am thrilled about that.
To an actual bird photographer, swans are probably what a Toyota Corolla is to a car enthusiast. Plain, common, and boring. Not to me. They may be common, but they are anything but plain and boring. In fact, they are majestic and inspiring. The challenge in swan photography lies in catching them in the right surroundings and having them pose, or interact with each other, in an interesting way. That requires a certain amount of patience and time spent observing them.
My interest in swans, I think, comes from my wife, the American, who wasn’t used to the kind of swans we have in Denmark and made me open my eyes to their beauty. I mean, I grew up here and was used to swans and, like with so many other things before photography changed how I look at just about everything, I never really gave them much thought.
Another boost to my swan fascination came with the image below. It was taken not too long after I got my first “real” camera (my Sony A33) and is probably still among the three best photos I have ever taken (which, in a way, is a little sad considering all the practice I have gotten since). Look at that composition! How the swan on the left provides perfect balance to the castle on the right, and how the swan in the center of the image looks straight into the camera. Sure, I have enhanced it and turned the “magical fairy tale” knob to 10, but I like it. And it really made me consciously seek out swans to include in my images ever since.
The next image is also several years old and is my first picture of a swan with its wings spread out. It looks like an angel. Now, if you live next to swans and see swans every day, seeing them with their wings spread out like that may not be such a rare occurrence. But while I see swans quite often – probably once or twice a week – the times I have seen them in the last five years, with their wings spread out like that, can be counted on one hand. And catching them like that from the right angle and distance is even rarer. So it’s something I’m always hoping will happen when I head to a place with swans, and it almost never does.
One of the things that make swans so special is their monogamy. They stick to the same partner for life and raise a new brood of cygnets every year. On a few occasions, my wife and I have followed a swan couple through a season and seen how they have built their nest, laid on their eggs, and taken their tiny new cygnets for a swim. And we have seen the cygnets grow and finally replace their gray ugly duckling plumage with beautiful white feathers. This can also be a heartbreaking experience as sometimes the swan couple will start out with six cygnets and then lose them one by one to predatory fish or birds until only a couple remain. In the below picture, a family of swans (and a friendly duck) is chilling in a local creek under the moonlight. All right, I admit, the full moon has been added, but the moon really was out that night, although not quite in such a favorable position.
Swans do other things than just be beautiful and majestic. They can be some nasty birds and apparently very territorial. One afternoon I was walking along a lake when the below scene played out. One particularly angry swan was busy keeping his part of the lake free from other swans. It’s extremely dramatic when big birds like that get in each other’s throats, and you really don’t want to make a swan cross. This was shot with a cell phone and turned out very well for me, but at the expense of the poor couple that had ventured into the angry swan’s territory. Or maybe they were the bad guys who had ventured into the angry swan’s territory and got what they deserved. Who knows?
The next image is from the same lake and may even be one of the same swans, but a more common situation. There is nothing as serene and beautiful as a swan quietly drifting in and out between tufts of grass and waterweed during a sunset. They are like strange extra-terrestrial beings gracing our world with their other-worldly presence.
Standing close to a swan, you wouldn’t think that their size would allow them to be particularly good flyers. But as the perfect beings that they are, flying is of course not a problem. In fact, standing underneath a flock of swans as they pass over you is a magnificent experience. You hear them before you see them. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. The sound of their big wings is just one of their many majestic characteristics that leave you in awe and make you look up. If you are really lucky, as I was while taking the below picture, you are carrying your camera, the camera has a suitable lens mounted, and the shutter is set to a sufficiently fast speed. That rarely happens to me since my camera is usually in landscape photography mode, but in this case, everything aligned and I got one of my few sharp pictures of flying swans.
Last but not least: the swan heart image. I had been chasing this photo for almost as long as I have been chasing swans. Inspired by the town arms of the city that I work in, I wanted so badly to photograph two swans forming a heart with their long, beautiful necks. I had been close many times where I would see a swan couple drifting toward each other, only to break off at the last second or stick their necks into the water for food just at the crucial moment (I can’t count how many pictures I have of swans with their heads in the water).
And then, finally this year, on Valentine’s Day no less, this happened. It was a magical moment. The swan on the left had just landed on the water after having been out flying for a while. My prejudice about gender roles tells me that it was the male. The other swan – the female – saw him land, and they immediately headed towards each other and met in this, not quite perfect, heart shape in the middle of the lake. They spent the next few seconds almost wrapping their necks around each other in a loving embrace. I was absolutely thrilled.
I have tons more swan pictures in my collection, but these are some of the highlights. Swans are a subject I never get tired of, and I find it almost impossible to walk past a swan without taking its picture. Other birds may be rarer or more interesting in many ways, but none are as beautiful and photogenic in all their various poses and moods.
Foxgloves in the Valley of the Wolves
The other night I got on my bike and rode deep into the forest to do some shooting at an enclosure named Ulvedalen. Ulvedalen translates to Wolf Valley, which sounds dramatic, but there really are no wolves. I don’t know if there ever were. In return, there are foxes… or rather, their gloves. Foxgloves. The most magical clearings full of purple and white foxgloves. This was absolutely delightful for a photographer. I unfolded my tripod and got to work, thinking these images would be stellar.
They were not.
This is what one of the better images looked like straight out of the camera:
Now, there’s nothing unusual about a RAW image looking less than amazing without at least a few enhancements, but this? What a horrendous mess! Looks like someone sprayed youghurt on the camera lens.
I was not pleased and almost marked it “Rejected”. This was nothing like I remembered the scene. Where was the magic that I had felt when I was standing there? The whole scene had been so spellbinding that even the risk of having to ride my bike home through a pitch dark, unknown forest hadn’t been enough for me to quit shooting. And now it looked like it had all been for nothing. Not even my usual arsenal of post-processing tricks did anything to improve things. I needed to completely rethink my editing in order to save this disaster.
Well, the first thing the image needed was a good cropping. The center of the image actually hid a pretty good composition, with the curved leading line of foxgloves disappearing into the background. In return, all the dead branches that, on the scene, I’d thought constituted a wonderful foreground had to go. Not so with the tree stub on the right and the thick branches coming out of the ground like some creepy forest monster. Those work really well as a contrast to the pretty flowers.
Thinking back on the scene, I remembered it as being much darker and with the foxgloves drawing all the attention like little, colorful lanterns. That’s what I needed to recreate. The background behind the trees, in particular, needed to be all but eliminated with some serious darkening. In fact, everything in between the foxgloves needed to be darker and much more contrasty to the bright foxgloves. Plenty of Orton effect in Luminar and darkening brushes in Lightroom were among the tools I used to ensure that. The foxgloves themselves, which I remembered as being very purple and beautiful, and not the rather pale shade of the RAW image, also needed lots of work. I not only saturated them, but also brightened them – to make them seem almost glowing – with a tool I hadn’t used much before: Color Efex Pro, which is part of the old Nik tools collection.
Finally, in order to make the image less messy, I had to remove several stray foxgloves here and there. Same thing with a few branches that were working against the general front-to-back direction of the image. This is the final result:
Phew… it’s been a long time since I worked this hard on one image, but I really wanted a reminder of that beautiful evening. And I think I managed that quite well. It’s quickly becoming one of my favorite shots of the month of June. For me it’s a great example of the difference between what the camera sees and records and what your brain remembers.
The above image may not be how it actually looked and what was captured by the camera lens, but, by God, it is much closer to what I felt while standing there. And to me, that counts above everything else. So let this also be an illustration of 1) how I do not have any ethics when it comes to how much you are “allowed” to change an image in order to make it look the way you want it to – none.- and 2) apparently I do not have the photographic skills to make an image look right coming out of the camera. I rely a lot on my post-processing skills.
Do I have a problem with that? No. Does that make me less of an artist? Some would say yes. I choose to say no. (Not that I necessarily am one to begin with, but that’s another discussion.)
I Have a Problem With Sunglasses
I love wearing sunglasses. One of the main reasons I changed to contact lenses years and years ago was that I wanted to wear sunglasses. My eyes are quite light sensitive. It doesn’t take much for me to squint Read more
Overwhelmed by progress and abandonment
Remember this image?
Probably not, but I posted it in the fall after roaming one of my favorite local areas, a piece of beautiful open land with tall grass, scattered trees, bushes and ponds. I have seen rabbits there, and herons. I have walked it in a foot of mud and snow and when the ground split in zig-zag cracks due to drought.
That’s all over now. Today it looks like this:
The land is now torn apart by hundreds of dirt piles and ditches like these. Progress is coming. In a year’s time this will be a new part of the city, a new residential area for families with children. The rabbits and herons will be displaced and die. The rare piece of open, non-cultivated land will be but a memory.
I just realized all this the other day as I happily walked out there to see if I could put a new spin on this familiar territory with my camera. Sure, I’d seen that they were building a few houses near the road, but I never knew they were about to cover the entire 10 hectares in pavement, bricks, and hedges.
The sight of the destruction of this beautiful area almost made me nauseous. But it wasn’t long before this new realization turned into an opportunity. Making my way across and around the newly dug ditches had led me close to the old farm house that struts in the middle of the area. I had always steered in a long circle around the farm house as I didn’t want to get yelled at by whoever inhabited the place. Despite the lack of fences and crops, the land I was walking on may very well have been theirs.
But now, having ended up almost in their backyard, something seemed off about the place. I saw broken windows. I saw weeds everywhere. I saw junk randomly tossed on the ground. Holy cow, the the whole thing was abandoned!
Now, if you are not a photographer yourself, you don’t know that the word “abandoned” is sweet music in any photographer’s ears. Few things are as photogenic as abandoned locations that have been taken over by nature. There is just something about the contrast between human activity and the unrelenting nature that makes for good images.
Fearing a wrecking crew might show up at any minute to level the house, I unfolded my tripod and got to work. This could very well be my only chance to document the old buildings and the soul whose presence I could sense so clearly.
As I circled the house, it became more and more obvious that the farm had been in a state of abandonment and decay for years, possibly a decade or more. The walls were crumpling, trees were growing too close to the buildings. The inside of the stable showed no signs of animals having been present in ages.
One time, however, I stopped in my tracks. A tricycle – the kind that old people use – was parked in the front yard. Was someone here after all? But no, at closer inspection I could see that there was no air in the tires. It had been sitting there since whoever lived in the house left for the last time.
Maybe it was the tricycle, or maybe it was entering the below little backyard that suddenly made me envision life as it may have played out when it still existed here, and what led to its demise. Children running around, eventually growing older, moving away, uninterested in carrying on this farm that may have been in the family for generations. The old farmer and his wife, working the fields and livestock, until one day one of them dropped and could no longer work, leaving the other one lost and with no choice but to move into a retirement home for whatever time was left.
The sun was starting to set, and it was time for me to leave my new discovery behind. As I walked home, the passage of time felt more present than ever before. In less than a week I turn 50 years old. If the speed with which the last 20 years have gone by is any indication – and I fear that it is – the time when whatever traces I’m leaving behind start to fade is in sight. It may not be in shape of a farm, but it will probably be in the shape of what I have created on websites such as this one. And all these images, and thousands more, that no one has ever seen and no one ever will.
But that’s okay. When I got home and told my wife what I had experienced, she said something to the effect of, “Before our house was built, this area was someone else’s untouched ground, and they were probably pretty unhappy that new houses were being built.”
Her words stuck in my mind. The world is constantly changing. Generations follow generations, and the current generations have no say about the future. We have to accept that the world is only on loan to us. And we just have to make the best of it while we can.
The old farm house will probably be torn down one of these days. The new neighborhood will rise from the ground. I will find new places to shoot my images that few people will ever see. And one day when I’m gone, a server will be turned off and the images, too, will be gone forever.
But somewhere in the world, another middle-aged, overweight amateur photographer will leave his house and go out to shoot his pictures.
Blood, Sweat, and Forest Photography
Considering how few people actually see my photography – most of my images are only ever seen by me – I take it very seriously. I am finding my niche more and more in Danish landscape, and forest areas in particular. I love the forest. I grew up a few hundred meters from a forest and moved to my current home partly due to its vicinity to forest land.
But forest can be a challenging subject. Not for lack of compositions. But in order to take good forest pictures, you need to literally get off the beaten path and find the spots that no one ever sees. That is not always easy.
The other night I went back to the Strødam nature enclosure. I have written about it in the past, before I really knew what it was. I just knew there was a fence around it and signs telling you to stay out. Since then I have learned that it’s an area owned by the government used for nature research. They are basically letting an area of forest, lakes, and meadows take care of itself without much human disturbance. There are tons of birds and deer, and a herd of more or less free-roaming cows. In other words, a paradise for nature and landscape photographers. Except, photographers are not allowed to go there.
Well, back in February part of the fence around the area was suddenly gone. I had a feeling they were just replacing it, because it was old and worn out, and it turned out I was right. But for a few weeks in February I could at least pretend I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to go in, so I did. I have in fact shown you a few pictures from those excursions without mentioning where they were taken or the circumstances. But anyway, as much as I love those gray, dreary images of the winter forest, I felt I had to return to see what it looked like in the spring.
So, I shouldered my camera bag, saddled my bicycle, and rode out to the area a couple of hours before sunset. I knew there was an entrance that did not have a gate. A discreet sign tells you to please stay out, but that’s all, and on this evening I happened to look the other way as I passed it. Or at least, that was going to be my story if anyone asked.
A few bigger paths traverse the area, so I was able to ride my bicycle as I started my penetration into the forbidden land. I had not gone far before I heard a loud rustling sound from the brush. I couldn’t see what caused the sound, but moments later two deer appeared in a meadow next to the path. One of them quickly dispersed into the woods, but the other one stood there and watched me long enough for me to raise my camera and grab a picture. Unfortunately, I had the 16-35 mm lens on, so I couldn’t really zoom in on it much, but I still like the result.
For the next hour or so I crisscrossed the area, setting up my tripod wherever a sunbeam flooded the forest floor, a branch reached out, a broken tree had been left to rot, or whatever else constituted a composition in my all too receptive brain. That is my strength and my weakness as a photographer. I see compositions everywhere, and that leads to too many pictures and sometimes rushed execution, because I have to go to the next spot and the next spot and the next. Still, I got away with this string of photos that have passed my own quality control. Along the way I had suddenly heard a dog bark not very far away. The barking came closer, and in an instant I went from being an amateur photographer enjoying nature to Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. I was sure some nature police squad had spotted me and was trying to hunt me down for trespassing. I hid behind a tree and cursed myself for having left my bicycle out in the open.
In the end, the dog moved further away, and it had probably just been out for an evening walk with its human. Still, I sighed a breath of relief and went on my way.
By now it was starting to grow dark, but just as I was considering packing up and heading back home, I saw movement through the trees ahead of me. I walked closer and approached the edge of the forest, and that’s when I realized what was going on. It was the resident cow herd that was frolicking in the cool evening air. In other words, picture opportunity!
I snuck closer to the herd, which of course, they immediately spotted, un-stealthy as I am. So instead of posing for me, the cows took off, not walking lazily away, but at a gallop, and positioned themselves on a nearby ridge. They were staring at me, and I was staring back, and lo and behold, the leader cow started to move back down the hill towards me. At this point it should be mentioned that there was a fence between me and the herd. Still, I started to get a little apprehensive, because it didn’t look like a very solid fence. Soon the entire herd was moving back towards me, and the leader cow did not look particularly friendly. Now, I have not heard of killer cows in Denmark, but the whole situation was starting to seem a little dicey.
Still, I kept snapping away and kept my head cool enough to increase the ISO and keep the the exposure at a decent 1/50 seconds, and here’s the result of my efforts: possibly the best cow picture in my collection.Now, my wife always tells me to be careful whenever I head out on a photo mission, and I always say I will be, so I figured now was the time to live up to my word and begin my retreat in good order. So I shouldered my tripod and left the cows behind. Being cows, they probably never intended to attack me, but were merely curious and hoping for a bite to eat other than their usual grass. That wasn’t going to happen as it was now time to pack up my gear and head home…
Pack up my gear…. Where was my camera bag? Where was my camera bag?
WHERE WAS MY CAMERA BAG?????
As soon as the realization hit me that I did not have my camera bag with me, a panic started to spread through my body. Where did I last see it? I had no idea. Hopefully, I had just left it with my bicycle back on the path. I stumbled back through the underbrush, getting several nettle stings along the way. And no, there was no sign of my bag anywhere near my bicycle.
There was no way around it. I had to backtrack to all the locations I had been at, which by this time amounted to half a dozen, several of which I wasn’t even sure if I could find again, having walked through semi-dense forest to get to them.
As I pedaled back to the previous spot, and the one before that, thoughts of losing a bag containing maybe $2000 worth of camera equipment was very present in my mind… or having to come back early the next morning to continue the search… or worse, having to contact the nature enclosure administration and confess my sin of having entered the area without permission, but “pretty please, would you return my camera bag if you find it, thank you…”
That’s when I suddenly remembered when I had last seen it. At one of my last stops, I had changed lenses. That’s where I must have left the bag on the ground. And sure enough, I managed to make it back to the spot and found the bag exactly where I left it.
My legs burning from nettle stings and bloody scratches up and down my calves from scrambling through the brush, but relieved as hell, I was finally ready to head for the exit.
But my trouble had only just started. I wanted to leave the area through the southern edge. I had done that without problem during an earlier visit, because I had found a spot where two fences didn’t quite overlap and thereby left a hole big enough for a person to walk through. After finding the spot, which in itself was a challenge since no paths led to it, I realized that the missing overlap was no more.
I had to climb over the fence – with my bicycle.
The bicycle was the easy part. The fence was no taller than I was able to lift the it across. Getting my own 94 kilos to the other side was harder. There was nothing to really step on to get a good take-off, plus the fence was actually a little bit electric. I had visions of myself missing my leap and getting stuck straddling the fence and having my finer parts fried.
But it had to be done. I put my foot on the bottom string of the fence and leaped. The string broke and for a fraction of a second my worst fear was coming true. But through sheer adrenalin and will power I exerted my last strength and landed safely on the other side.
Almost overcome with exhaustion, I pulled my bicycle through the last shrubbery, tearing my shirt and adding a few more scratches to my legs. But I was out… I was finally out. I had been hunted by dogs, attacked by killer cows, had my legs shredded by thorns and nettles, almost lost most of my camera equipment, and been forced to cross an electric fence, but I was alive. And I had a memory card full of what I hoped was a bunch of outstanding images.
Back on the bicycle path, I found that the chain had fallen off my bike. I didn’t care. I put it back on and headed home.
Weekend getaway to the North Pole
They say that once every few thousand years, the magnetic poles flip, reversing north and south. What the scientists missed was that the flip took place last weekend, and for a brief period during the shift, positioned the North Read more
Blessed and cursed in Iceland
Iceland is all landscape photographers’ dream travel destination, and back in September I was fortunate enough to spend all of 20 hours there in connection with a return flight from the US to Denmark.
The deal with Icelandair was the following: get an insanely cheap flight to US and in return spend a little time – and money – in our beautiful, volcanic country. I figured, why not? I knew that whatever I saved on the plane ticket, I’d probably spend in Iceland, but the prospect of getting to shoot some of the most fascinating landscapes in the world intrigued me.
So after a little research I booked a six-hour bus tour covering what’s known as The Golden Circle, the southwest corner of Iceland where spectacular scenery is as plentiful as it is accessible. I was ready.
I arrived in Reykjavik at 6 o’clock in the morning on September 20 2016 after a seven-hour flight from Seattle. Having been unable to sleep on the plane, I was beginning to have some slight doubts about this whole endeavor. It didn’t help that I had six hours to kill before the bus tour even started, 50 minutes of which were spent on a shuttle bus going from the airport into the city of Reykjavik. A lot of the landscape that we passed on the way looked rather bleak, to put it mildly. The clouds were almost as black as the volcanic soil. Even the rays of sun seemed hostile, like big, extra-terrestrial search lights sweeping the ground looking for surviving humans.
Was this dark, bare landscape really the magical Iceland I had heard so much about? At this point I wished I’d just spent $200 more on that plane ticket and gone straight home to my warm, Danish bed.
Well, it was too late for regrets. I had to make the best of it. That included walking a couple of kilometers from the bus depot to downtown Reykjavik. If the country had indeed been taken over by aliens, a good bet was that their overlord could be found inside that dome in the background of the below picture.
I didn’t go to find out, but continued the opposite direction and, with the help of Google Maps, soon made it to the city center. Reykjavik is much bigger than I imagined and seems to be going through both some serious growth and an architectural update, including the brand new city hall as seen here:
After a 30-minute pit-stop at the local public library (always to the rescue when you most need them), I was ready for a little more exploration and found my way to a park rising above downtown and offering this view of the harbor and the new performing arts center Harpa.
Then the rain started.
It had been threatening to rain since I’d left the airport. I had felt plenty of drops and hoped it wouldn’t amount to more than that, but as I continued my walk through the city, the rain started pouring from a steel gray sky from which the dots of blue and rays of sunlight had now completely vanished. I had to find refuge in a covered bus stop and sat there shivering with cold for an hour while bus passengers came and went. The fact that I didn’t take a single picture of life buzzing by on this busy Reykjavik street tells you all about my state of mind. I was hungry, tired, wet, jet-lagged, sore, and just plain miserable.
Finally, the time came when I had to go to the pick-up place for the Golden Circle bus tour. A small shuttle bus took me back to the bus depot where the actual bus departed from, and we were on our way. When I say “we” I mean myself and about 10 other tourists, the driver, and a male guide who, in his own quiet, understated way, entertained us with jokes about volcanic eruptions and all the other hard conditions Icelandic people had to endure.
The first part of the tour went through some more bleak, and yet fascinating landscape, where overland pipelines transporting thermally heated water criss-crossed the treeless hills, and electric powerlines towered above us like deadly steel triffids.
Things became a little more hospitable when we picked up two more passengers at an idyllic horse breeding ranch. The stumpy, long-haired, and extremely tough Icelandic ponies are one of the country’s primary exports, and they supposedly cost fortunes.
The first real stop of the tour came after about an hour’s drive (during which I think I dozed off for a few minutes, the first sleep I’d had in close to 24 hours). It was the famous Haukadalur geyser area where a geyser named Geysir actually gave name to… well… geysers.
Although I have experienced geysers several times in Yellowstone National Park, steaming water shooting out of the ground will always be one of the most awesome natural phenomenons you can witness. A short let-up in the rain even made it possible to get some decent pictures, and unlike most geysers in Yellowstone, here you didn’t have to wait hours, days or months for an eruption. This particular specimen knew how to please a crowd and released its load of boiling water every 10-15 minutes.
Before the next stop, we passed through a landscape that was turning more and more breathtaking. There were no huge mountains chains on the horizon – in fact, in places it was almost flat – but rivers and creeks were everywhere, framed by lush green colors and this characteristic soft icelandic light that despite the cloud cover still felt quite tangible.
Having not really studied the Golden Circle in advance, nothing had prepared me for what came next. Sure, the guide talked about a waterfall. I knew waterfalls. I’d seen tons of waterfalls two weeks previously in Canada. They didn’t come much better than that.
Except, they did. After a short hike from the parking lot, what revealed itself in front of me was one of the most magnificent sights my eyes had beheld in my 47 years on Earth: a waterfall the size of a 10-story apartment block. All the fatigue, misery, and pain that the day had been so full of vanished in a split second, and all I could think of was how to capture this natural wonder with my little, utterly insufficient piece of man-made technology called a camera.
You’d think the Gullfoss waterfall would be a slam dunk, but to be honest, while I’m fairly happy with the result, it does not tell half the story of what it was like to stand there. You don’t truly sense the sheer magnitude and power of all that water roaring through the canyon.
Part of the problem was not my photography skills, but the fact that the surrounding landscape was so bare. The waterfall was all there was. There was nothing to put in the foreground, nothing that could work as a scale indicator, and no sunshine or sunset to enhance the colors.
Perhaps my best capture of the Gullfoss waterfall is actually the stitch of 2-3 images, which is what you see below. I had followed a trail down to the top shelf of the waterfall where I snapped several images, including a few long exposures. My tripod was safely packed in my checked baggage at Keflavik Airport, so I had to place the camera on the rocks and use a 2-second shutter delay.
Another challenge was that the rain was starting to pick up again and that we only had about 30 minutes before departure. So I worked fast and frantically to take all the pictures I could, using two different lenses, two different cameras (my cell phone being the other one), and all kinds of settings to cover all my bases. I was actually surprised and proud of myself for not screwing things up and dropping a lens into the raging river. The last few years of frequent picture-taking has paid off. I know my camera and can almost work it in my sleep, even when things get hectic. This next picture tells you all you need to know about the conditions I was working under.
As it turned out, I was back on the bus before most everyone else, but I was happy and elated and knew I’d done what I could under difficult circumstances. I also knew that no matter what had happened earlier in the day and what would happen from then on, my Icelandic detour would have been more than worth it.
When we arrived at the last stop an hour or so later, it wasn’t just raining. It was pouring. Hard. I put my camera under my vest and walked with the rest of the party up to where the tectonic plates of Europe and North America happened to meet. Or rather, separate. It was also the location of an ancient viking parliament where the earliest Icelanders met to make decisions or put criminals to trial.
Under normal circumstances my camera shutter would have been working non-stop to capture every detail of this historically and scientifically significant spot. But the pouring rain meant I could only get the camera out from under my vest for a second or two at a time, or just enough time to point and shoot. It’s a miracle I got any useable pictures at all.
The below image is the actual rift between the two continents. In some places it’s no wider than you could stand with a foot in both Europe and North America.
While not a photographic highlight of my Icelandic adventure, the visit to Thingvellir, as the area is called, was still a mindblowing look into the past, both geological and historical. Moreover, it was a perfect end to a bus tour that, at one point I wished I’d never booked, but very soon realized would be an experience of a lifetime.
At this point I packed my camera away. I did take a couple more pictures with my cell phone on the way back to Reykjavik, but nothing spectacular. Back at the bus depot, I had to wait a couple of hours for my ride back to the airport.
After arriving at the airport, the rest of the evening until my 1 a.m. flight was spent picking up my luggage from the storage place a kilometer from the airport terminal (a distance I had to walk to and from in more pouring rain), queuing up in the only passenger queue I could find (the wrong one, it turned out… all the German voices should have tipped me off), walking what felt like three miles through the airport to my gate (I’d always thought Keflavik Airport was fairly small… boy, was I wrong), sitting in a chair at the gate for two hours unable to sleep, then lining up to board the plane only to be told it would be 30 minutes late, and then finally, FINALLY dropping into my plane seat after having walked 20,000 steps and been awake for about 35 hours.
I may have dozed off for an hour or so during the flight, but I would not get any real sleep until I was all the way home 5-6 hours later, more dead than alive, and the last 40 hours seeming like a dream – except, I had the pictures to prove that it happened.