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Photographing Iceland in Winter - Part II

The colors from the 80's

It is still a bit cold for the animals in hibernation and the cold blooded crawlers to be out on these trails in Central Washington but not cold enough for the creeks and small lakes to be frozen. It almost feels like the end of winter but the lack of a lush green skin on the hills will remind one of the remaining days of winter with warmer days just around the corner.

It is the time of the year when nature in this region is engulfed in pastel colors.

Snow covered jetty

Hints of life beneath the snow and rocks, yellow ochre grass made me stop the car, get out and photograph this unknown, unnamed jetty in northwest Iceland.

Akranes

First inhabited by Irish settlers in the 9th century, this beautiful city seats north of Hvalfjörður. Skipped the snow clad city core to find green rocks on the west side by the ocean.

Polar lights over Snæfellsnes

An unexpected clear weather in forecast made me decide to drive north and west of Reykjavik in the night of 12-Feb ‘22 to film the night sky but auroral activity forecast was not so promising. From the sunset around 5 pm local time (UTC) until about 10 pm there wasn’t a lot of polar lights activity in the northern sky besides moderate bands of green that flickered occasionally. Around midnight the intensity changed, with magenta and red light pillars appearing above and sometimes even towards the southern sky. The bright moon lit the foreground, creating favorable conditions for photographing the polar lights.

Photographing Iceland in Winter

The winterland will always be exotic to me, and winter being my favorite season it is no doubt I enjoy photographing sceneries like these more than anything else and any other season. I have been to Iceland many times in the past during winter but somehow managed to avoid winter storms until 2022. Call it a fortunate or unfortunate fate but this has got to be the most unique of all visits to Iceland, not only from photography PoV but also the experience of driving in blinding blizzard through mountain passes in search for clear skies, search for a hot meal at 3 am in the morning amidst a pandemic, to name a few.

From the moment we landed in Keflavik till now there has been very little “gaps” in between snowfall and strong wind. This was certainly not the weather I was hoping for when I booked the trip in Aug ‘21 but I was mentally prepared for it about two weeks before the trip after looking at extended weather forecast. We packed our best winter gear for the trip and it pay off well. Although it is not extremely cold (temperature in the 20s F) the feels like was in the teens and sometimes single digit Fahrenheit especially at night with high wind blowing fine snow dust across the plains. The weather is not deterring us at all from going out every day, and capture these amazing winter sceneries across the west side of the country (I plan to drive eastwards later in the week).

While most of the roads in Reykjavik’s vicinity are cleaned very frequently, the highways became frozen as we went farther from the city. The temperatures being way below freezing was a good thing: kept the roads dry and therefore, less slippery. I have a Honda CR-V with studded tires that has decent handling on the snow. In between shooting I kept the camera inside a woolen hat so that the battery does not drain quickly, kept my hands warm in the insulated pockets of my jacket because I do not own fitted gloves for my wide hands short fingers and at times used the car to shield the tripod from wind gusts.

Sunrise is around 9:30 am and sunset around 5 pm everyday. Waking up at 3 am due to jet lag actually helped me get to destinations before sunrise, ahead of tour buses arriving with people.

I would like to think this type of weather with more than a foot of snow around coastal Iceland is not common, since it is so close to the ocean, making this trip a special and unique experience.

Seconds to sunrise

Sun rays peeking through an expected gap in the clouds seconds before sunrise.

Vermillon sky

As soon as I looked at the beach from the overlook by the parking lot, I knew this day will be long. The tide was out several feet, allowing me to walk on dry ground (sand/rocks) north of the sea stacks.

It was cloudy unlike the last time when the above was mostly blue sky speckled with tiny clouds only near the horizon. A short walk on a muddy trail, scaling numerous tree trunks and I was back on the beach. The creek that drained into the ocean by the sea stack looked calm, the water surface occasionally breached by stones that bystanders threw at it. It was so cloudy that dramatic sunset seemed improbable but Emily and I were not willing to give up. With the day almost done and most beach visitors either back in the parking lot ready to leave or already left, I made my way south towards rocks that were farther out in the water, a familiar spot from last time when I was there with only the 45mm lens. This time not only I had a wide 21mm lens but also variable ND filter to allow me take long exposures hours before sunset.

Towards the end of the day the western sky opened up and sunlight lit up the rocks in perfect time.

The clouds turned orange for a second time after sunset providing more opportunities to photograph. The second and final episode was a lot more dramatic especially since there was no sun above the horizon, the only available light was from the reflecting clouds and a faint moon to the south west.

When the show was over fog rolled in from the north and as we walked back to our car it poured over the stacks hiding them until its time for the next gig possibly the next morning.

Frosted power lines

Besides the primary subject in this photograph, snow covered power lines illuminated by car headlights…

It was the weekend night out on the plains east of the Cascades, I was testing (new) Hasselblad’s widest lens for X system: the XCD 4/21. Arriving at this scene I realized very quickly it was not the best lens to frame the shot. There was only two ways to fill the view with the subject (the house): walk closer to it or use a less wide lens. A combination of sense of being respectful to private property and deep snow on the ground made me not choose the first option, and a desire to stick to the new lens made the second option less savory.

Light pillars in the lake

It is incredibly beautiful how lights at the edge of a water body form long pillar-like reflections on the water, especially when viewed from the other side of the water body.

Stacks in tide

For a world less square [from XPAN brochure]

Far from home

I don’t know many people who would drive four hours for a sunset but there are creatures like me - they exist!

32 sec at f/16, ISO 100 Hasselblad XCD 4/45P

32 sec at f/22, ISO 100 Hasselblad XCD 4/45P

Another weekend, another place to shoot at sunset.

Tacoma - half day

The weather changed from clear sunny skies to rolling storm clouds in just an hour, providing me excellent opportunities to shoot in varied lighting and other variance while I learn to shoot with my (new) medium format camera. When you’re shooting with the (Hasselblad) X1DII 50c, autofocus (AF) is not your friend. There are two ways to operate or get help with manual focus (MF): focus peaking and zoom. In my experience, I found focus peaking to be very unreliable, or perhaps I was using it wrong. The earlier part of the day while using focus peaking, most of my shots turned out soft but I got lucky with a handful.

Later in the day, I started using magnify focus method and got lot more reliable result. The camera being on the tripod (for long exposures) made it easy to use this MF method.

All in all, I am very happy to be shooting in medium format: the large sensor and large pixels makes a difference added Hasselblad color science and DR. I am not going to express myself on how much I love the physical design of this camera, and keeping that aside the features I love the most about this new system based on a very short period of playing with it are:

In-lens shutter system eliminating vibrations especially for those extremely long exposures
Appealing and somewhat acceptable noise grain at high ISO, keeping aside the fact that you’re getting less noise than FF cameras. Say goodbye to destructive noise reduction steps in post-processing tools like LR
Superb color reproduction and sharpness
Greater dynamic range, even better than (long time king) Sony FF cameras I own
Weather sealed - I have not taken the camera out in the rain but when you are living in the PNW chances are you will, very soon

4:3

After years of shooting in Full Frame, started a new chapter with Medium Format. Of the twenty something photographs I shot today, here are my favorites.

And now a few obligatory photos of the new gear…

Birds of sunset

Gulls on a beach at sunset

Steel and concrete

Spotlight

In the scene I could barely notice the column of sunlight illuminating Maylor Pt. across the bay. As I hurried my way out from a late lunch/early dinner to the wharf looking for signs of sunset, this scene caught my eye…

Basic editing workflow

Regardless of whether you call yourself a photographer or not, I am sure you have come across the age old question:

Did you edit this photo?

Now there are different ways to interpret this question. If I were to not take offense from the question, I’d assume it meant to be a compliment, asserting the end result is pretty regardless of whether it is far twisted and manipulated from reality, the actual scene. It could mean the person who asked is trying to critique your photograph or your skills to record imagery out of the camera in contrast or comparison to manipulations in post, or could mean the person is simply trying to understand how far from reality the end result is - assuming reality being what you got straight out of the camera.

If you are not shooting RAW, the image you are getting out of the camera is most likely a JPEG file. This is already “manipulated” by the camera. If you are shooting RAW then it is up to the photographer to export the image into a format such as JPEG that is shareable. This means whether you like it or not, the photograph is “manipulated” in one way or another therefore, the question we came across earlier in this post is vague. Educated, alternative questions could be:

Did you edit this photo or let the camera do it?
How different was the actual scene compared to this photo?

The photographs that come out of my camera are primarily RAW files, i.e. I try to capture as much data as I can while shooting, then manipulate in post processing to produce images that are visually pleasing to me. RAW images do not look anywhere close to how the real scene looked at the time of shooting and therefore, my primary goal is to “fix” attributes such as white balance, brightness and color in post to get the end result as close as possible. But this does not mean it has to be always realistic.

Now that we have established the purpose and importance of recognizing post processing in photography, let me introduce you to my basic workflow: I use Photoshop mainly for three things: perspective correction, color grading and (most important of all) selective editing. Sometimes the perspective corrected version does not look as appealing as the straight-out-of-camera original with rectilinear distortion (therefore I abandoned this edit), this actually means I am going to preserve the “distorted” original for this particular photograph, not attempt to make it look like how the eyes perceived…

Reality is merely another version created by the human brain