Dritvik Elephant Foot

Dritvik Elephant Foot, a photo by Pantheroux on Flickr.

Here's an oldie, but a goodie. Taken on a black sand beach called Dritvik on the Snaefellnes peninsula in Iceland. These rocks were interesting in real life, but only came to life through the camera lens when I brought out the wide angle.

So far my experiment with posting photos to the blog from Flickr is working. The photos no longer appear in a public Picasa album, which is good. The downside - I think Flickr automatically crops the photos to square... so in some cases the composition is messed up (as with my gooseberries). I also have to log into the blog to tag the photos and reformat my text.

I have taken ~100 new photos in the past few weeks (some long exposures of Ottawa at night, and some shots on the Jack Pine Trail). Unfortunately, I can't upload them until my hard drive issues are fixed.

I decided to post an Iceland photo today, just to switch things up a bit. This photo was taken on the first day we left Reykjavik to drive around the island. We had all sorts of lofty plans for how far we would make it, and where we would spend the night. We ended up hiking in these hills less than 30 minutes outside of Reykjavik, and that took most of the day! It was stressful at the time, as I was worried about seeing everything in Iceland in our 2 short weeks. In retrospect, these unintended side journeys yielded some of the best photos and some of the best memories.

Waterfalls are everywhere in Iceland... We saw so many that it was impossible to keep track. This is only the second waterfall we saw on our journey (the first being at Thingvillir). I have a few photos of this waterfall, most of which didn't turn out. I didn't hit my waterfall photography stride until much later on in the trip. Most of the shots are taken with the 50mm lens and a neutral density filter, as I'm trying to capture the motion of the water. This one was taken with the wide angle lens, and it's the unique perspective that makes it an interesting shot.

This photo was taken at Hofn in southeastern Iceland. We were in Iceland from May 24-June 6. May is considered the "shoulder season" - there are a few tourists, but not too many. We didn't pre-book any of our hotels, and didn't have problems finding a place to stay. It was common for the highway to be empty in both directions as far as the eye could see. Come June 1st, the high season begins. We happened to see the ferry come in from Denmark on June 1st, and caravan after caravan came spilling out onto the road with license plates as diverse as UK, Romania, Germany and Spain. This also meant a huge increase in hotel prices. When the Hotel Hofn wanted to charge us 30% more than we had been paying elsewhere, we thought it was just a part of the seasonal increase. The room was ok, but nothing special.

We went out in the evening to look at the ocean. The water was perfectly still, and the sky (at times) was almost the same color as the water. I fooled around trying to take some long exposures by resting the camera on a park bench as I was too lazy to walk back to the hotel and get the tripod. None of them turned out. The best shot ended up being this rather simple composition with a normal-length exposure and interesting clouds.

The Hotel Hofn advertised breakfast from 7am-10am. By my way of thinking, this should mean that a person could show up in the dining room at 10am and eat. By Graem's way of thinking, it means that everyone should be finished eating and ready to clear the dining room by 10am. In either case, we went for breakfast at 9:40 (plenty of time to grab a piece of toast from the buffet and a cup of coffee), only to find that the dining room was locked and breakfast had been put away. I was fuming about the scathing review I was going to write for the Hotel Hofn online, and Graem was insisting that it was actually our fault for being 'late'. When we checked out, they apologized for putting the breakfast away early and deducted 6500 kronur from our bill, making the hotel only slightly more expensive than what we were used to paying (for hotels that included breakfast). I made a mental note to increase the hotel's rating from 1 star to 2 in my review.

I intend to review all of our Iceland hotels, though haven't gotten around to it yet... the pain of being home from Iceland is still too strong for me to think about the trip objectively in the past tense. All of my reviews will be glowingly positive or neutral, except for the Hotel Hofn. If I return to Hofn, I'll probably stay in one of the two guesthouses there rather than the hotel. I know nothing about the guesthouses, but I figure it would be worth the gamble.

I've been really bad at posting here lately. Hopefully I can change that. This is one of my favorite Iceland photos... though I spent most of the trip trying to capture it. Farms and houses in rural Iceland are distributed seemingly at random. The explanation I read for this was that when the Vikings settled Iceland, there were no natives there, and therefore no need to guard against enemies. People simply settled wherever they wanted to - usually in the most beautiful places and places that afforded some natural protection from the elements.

I wanted to capture a particular sort of bucolic scene with sheep grazing in the foreground, red-roofed white farmhouses, and something quintessentially Icelandic in the background. It was more difficult to take this picture than I imagined it would be. Many of my attempts are marred by power lines, fences and boring or blown-out skies. Most of these shots were taken from the car window as we were driving by. The sheep and houses were sometimes so far away they looked like specks. Motion blur was also a problem.

This is my best Icelandic farm scene photo. I have my sheep and my farmhouses. The mountain in the background is unmistakably Icelandic, and I have some beautiful ominous clouds! I didn't touch the colors in post-processing. Much of southern Iceland is green in the spring, and when the sun shines, this green is very, very bright.

The Iceland photos are finally posted! Sorting them and getting them ready has required nearly 2 weeks of nonstop work... hence no regular posts here. I still plan to post some of the better ones here in the coming days. In the meantime, here is a link to the Picassa web album.

The photo posted today is of Gulfoss. There are many waterfalls in Iceland. Some are heavily visited tourist attractions, and some are just found in the hills or at the side of the road. Gulfoss is one of the better known tourist attractions in Iceland. I honestly thought none of my photos there would turn out. It was hard to compose a shot without getting a bunch of people in the frame. It was a windy day, and I was pretty much soaked with the spray from the waterfall. I thought I would have water drops all over the camera lens. Nonetheless, I was blessed with a rainbow and amazing light. The lens stayed dry long enough to fire off (literally) a couple of good shots.

I worked on the Iceland photos this weekend pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. I have about 90 ready for posting (of an estimated 400-500). I have pretty much decided to put them in a web album. I'll send out a link after I have all of the photos in the album. Quite a few people have been asking about the Iceland photos who would just want to view them all at once, without being bothered by text or scrolling through a blog. Also... 500 photos represents about a year's worth of blog-fodder. Much as I loved Iceland, I'm sure I'll want to post photos of something else this year! What I will be doing is posting the best photos to the blog, as well as those that have interesting stories behind them.

Here's the first.

This is a photo of Snaefellsjokull glacier (jokull means glacier in Icelandic). It was taken on the fourth day of our vacation. At this point in the trip, I was very stressed out about our slow progress. I had been reading about Iceland on the internet and in our travel handbook. I had seen a few 2-week itineraries created by other people which basically involved touring the Golden Circle (Thingvillir, Geysir and Gulfoss) on the first afternoon, then taking in the Snaefellsjokull glacier/peninsula on the second day. Well... We received our rental jeep very late on the second day, then got cranky, hungry and lost wandering around Thingvillir... never mind Geysir and Gulfoss! On the second day, we got sidetracked hiking up a mountain barely 30 minutes outside of Reykjavik... we never even saw the Snaefellsjokull glacier, let alone the whole peninsula! I had identified things that I wanted to see throughout the island, and already we were so far behind in our itinerary. It was at this point we decided we were going to have to skip the Westfjords!

Iceland is pretty much taken over by tourists during the high season. If you're researching a trip there, you'll read about all of these things that you must see (Blue Lagoon, Golden Circle, etc). To be honest, my favorite parts of the trip (as a photographer and as a curious traveller) were those that fell off the beaten path a bit... those that we stumbled on accidentally. Yes... the highly publicized and well-toured waterfalls are amazing... but some of the waterfalls we found beside remote gravel roads were equally spectacular... and I could play around with my camera as much as I wanted to without worrying about other tourists. Yes... the geysir is worth seeing... but photographing the geysir surrounded by 50 tourists and a rope fence reminded me of photographing a lion in a zoo cage - not very exciting and frankly kind of sad.

Iceland has some beautiful paved highways. They have secondary highways which are well-maintained gravel roads, as well as rougher roads into the interior, designated "F-roads". The F-roads only open in mid-summer, once all of the melting is finished. In order to travel on F-roads, a 4X4 is required. We tried to rent one and were given a Toyota RAV 4 - as one of my coworkers put it, the soccer mom's 4X4. We took a little dirt and gravel road to Snaefellsjokull. At the road's origin from the highway, there was a sign saying, "Impassable". Being used to wimpy Canadian road signage, we scoffed at this and proceeded to take the impassable road. We hadn't yet learned that Icelanders don't mess around with road signs. If they say a bend in the road should be taken at 30km/h, that is probably a good suggestion. If they say a road is impassable, you might, for example, find yourself driving right up to a glacier - sheer snow and ice with no traversable path. This is what happened to us.

Looking through my photos, I must have been having some sort of brain malfunction when I chose my camera settings to photograph the glacier. Nonetheless, the light was good enough that day to make up for my ineptness. The Snaefellsjokull photos are among the best I've taken so far. Look forward to seeing more when I get the web album up.

This shot was taken near the Rideau River. It's yet another photo that illustrates my recent love affair with the wide-angle lens. If you asked me last spring what my favorite lens was, it would be hands-down the macro. Now it would be my precious 14-24mm zoom. Each lens has a particular situation and subject matter where it shines (even the Lensbaby). I can't wait to track down some birds and wildlife to give my telephoto a real workout!

This is one of many shots I took by the Rideau river last weekend. Most of my photos from that trip are macros of water, rocks and ice. This is one of my favorites. I'm in love with my wide-angle lens these days. I'm also rereading a book about Ansel Adams which has me infatuated with epic landscapes and sweeping skies. I wish I had more opportunity for landscape photography myself. What I like best about this photo, however, is that it has a distinct "spring on the prairies" feel, rather than a "winter in Ontario" feel.

This is another of my favorite photos from last weekend. I like the composition with the trees and the buildings, and the stark white of the undisturbed snow. A wide angle lens makes even the most mundane things look interesting.

This is probably the most interesting photo I took on my trip to the Experimental Farm last weekend. The wide angle lens gives things a different perspective... I was actually standing mere steps from the yellow house, although through a 14mm lens, it looks far away. This photo also contains something that has been rare since I moved to Ontario - an interesting sky! I really miss the vibrant prairie skies. My brother-in-law recently visited and made the comment that the sky always looks the same in Ottawa. He's right. It's always bright white, or a uniform grey... very drab and dull for a photographer. Last weekend I was rewarded (however briefly) with some amazing color and light.

I finally have a few days off from work and was desperate to take a photo journey. I have seen quite a few patients from Cornwall, Ontario, and was curious about the place. Since it's situated right on the St. Lawrence River, I figured there would be something interesting to photograph there. Unfortunately, in typical Graem and Andrea style, we did not leave the house until after 1pm. Then, we had a bunch of drawn-out and mundane errands to run before hitting the road. The days are getting longer now, but not by that much. We raced toward Cornwall as the sun raced toward he horizon. We realized that we were destined to lose the race, so made a detour to Morrisburg. I tried looking up Morrisburg, Ontario on Google Maps, but alas it does not exist there. I was redirected to South Dundas, which is somewhat north of Morrisburg, and not on the St. Lawrence.

The temperature today was -20 degrees Celsius. It is probably the coldest day we have had so far this winter. For someone who grew up on the prairies, -20 is really not that cold. It sure seemed cold, though, with the wind coming right off of the water. It was not a good photography day for me. I was hoping to try out the new lens (a 70-200mm f2.8 zoom). I had it set on manual focus from the last time I had used it, and forgot to switch it back to auto. Most of my shots with it were blurry... which actually didn't matter since I couldn't compose a decent shot to save my life today. Partly it can be blamed on the cold, but partly my concentration was just all over the place.

Luckily the wide-angle rescued the day (yet again). As sunset turned into night, I brought out the tripod and took some long exposures. A couple were actually decent. One is posted here, and one is on Red Bubble.

It is supposed to be warmer for the rest of the week. I'm posting this at 5am and I haven't been to bed yet... but I hope to haul my carcass out early tomorrow and find somewhere interesting to go.

This is another photo taken in Hawkesbury, Ontario. It is similar to the one I have already posted, however in this case the sky was more dramatic. The clouds prevented the sun from being overpowering, so no HDR was required.

This photo was taken at a park near Dow's Lake in Ottawa in the first week of December. If you peer into the far right hand corner of the photo, you can see that the grass was not only visible, but still green! Unfortunately that has changed now... Everything is covered by a couple feet of snow which will probably stick around until at least April. At least we were lucky enough to stave it off for this long.

This was my best shot of that day (and really the only shot worth posting). I'm not happy with the exposure. For some reason my RAW shots always look properly exposed, but when I convert them to JPG, they are underexposed... and I can't fix it without blowing out the sky. I guess I'll have to get more adept at HDR technique.

Speaking of exposure, when my computer was out of commission, I used Graem's computer, and noticed that a lot of my photos look very oversaturated on his monitor (especially reds). I wonder if my monitor needs to be calibrated. I hope I'm not making a fool of myself by posting garishly oversaturated photos all over the internet. If anyone else finds my reds blown out and the photos oversaturated, please leave a comment!

In other news, I bought a new lens today! By the time I got home it was too dark to do much experimenting, but I hope to give it a thorough workout soon. I also have more indoor macro work planned with off-camera lighting. So maybe the dearth of new material won't last as long as I had originally anticipated.

Here's another photo taken at Gatineau Park. I waited for a long time to photograph this waterfall as there were quite a few people around, many with cameras. Most of my photos didn't turn out, but I like the way the light was shining on the water in this one.

This photo was taken last weekend in Hawkesbury, Ontario. Hawkesbury is about halfway between Montreal and Ottawa. We stopped there on the way home from Montreal to take some photos and eat dinner. Everyone at the restaurant spoke French. It felt weird for me to be in Canada but unable to understand what anyone was saying. I actually felt more at ease in Costa Rica and the Philippines. At least there, it was blatantly obvious that I was a tourist and nobody made the automatic assumption that I would understand them.

The dramatic sky and relative lack of garish man-made objects afforded me the rare opportunity to use my wide-angle lens. This is actually my first attempt at HDR photography... or rather Graem's first attempt to teach me to create an HDR image from one of my photos. I have to admit that I was exhausted, bored and dozing off. I like taking photos much more than I like post-processing them. I was captivated by the first few HDR photos I saw. They were scenes shot in a countryside village in the UK complete with cobblestone roads and houses with thatched roofs. I couldn't believe that these images came from a camera... they looked more like the medieval houses rendered in a computer game I played in junior high... or maybe illustrations from a storybook. Frequenting a few online photo-sharing sites, I started to become frankly bored with HDR. The element of photography I like most is capturing things I find interesting or beautiful and sharing them with other people. The world is not a storybook or video game, and HDR photos always seem a bit fake and insincere to me... In an effort to improve on reality, we end up with a poor and cheap imitation.

In the midst of all the HDR photos, I have seen a few very tastefully done landscapes and macros with subtle HDR technique. I hope to experiment more with HDR, and these are the ones I want to emulate. Basically, I just want to bring out the details in the shadow areas of my landscape shots without blowing out the sky.

This is a Red Bubble reject taken in early 2009. Believe it or not, the temperature was about -35 degrees Celsuis the evening this shot was taken. The sky was just spectacular.

The other photo I posted from that day is very popular on Red Bubble. It was my most viewed and commented photo for a long time. This particular shot never received much Red Bubble love. In fact, it was rejected from several Red Bubble groups as being 'technically inadequate'.

Whenever we visit my in-laws and I have my portable hard drive with me, they insist on seeing all of my photos. The problem with that is that I take a lot of photos... the majority uninteresting, even to me. When I visit a new place, I have no interest in photographing people or the usual iconic landmarks that other tourists photograph. At the same time, it's common for me to take 100 or more shots of the same flower trying to get everything right, or to photograph the same landscape from a million different vantage points using different camera settings. It must be incredibly painful for anyone to view all of my photos if I haven't sorted through them first to pick out the best ones. To be honest, it is even kind of painful for me.

My in-laws sat patiently through my collection of winter 2009 landscapes (>5000 photos in all), too polite to flee the scene. This photo of the silos is the only one my father-in-law commented on. He liked the composition. That simple compliment meant more to me than any amount of gratuitous Red Bubble feedback.

I posted the color version of this photo on Red Bubble, where it has been fairly well-received so far. It's another photo taken in Val-des-Bois at sunset. A boat had just passed by leaving ripples in the smooth water surface. I couldn't decide whether I liked the color or the monochrome version more, so I decided to post one there and one here. In truth, I think the monochrome one may be better.

My favorite thing about this photo is its simplicity. The trees and ripples on the water are in silhouette - their presence merely suggested by black shapes.

Lately I've been trying to reduce things down to their simplest terms - not only with photography, but with life in general. I used to like only very detailed drawings and paintings - ones where you could distinctly see every leaf and blade of grass, the more detail the better. I viewed stylized art as being rather "lazy". I'm coming to realize that simplicity can be technically quite difficult and often takes more thought than creating a detailed piece. I recently saw a drawing of a tree composed of only 3 lines. This drawing was, to me, more representative of a tree than a more detailed drawing, or even a photo of an actual tree could have been. I had to laugh a little bit at the paradox of that notion. I guess that's what I'm trying to achieve with my photos.

Last weekend, we went on a photo journey to Val-des-Bois, Quebec. Up until last year, my only visit to Quebec had been a layover in the Montreal airport when I was en-route to somewhere else. Last year when I visited Ottawa, I ventured across the bridge to Gatineau. I got lost looking for the Museum of Civilization and became quite hungry wandering aimlessly around downtown Gatineau. I was afraid to stop for food anywhere because I don't speak French.

Val-des-Bois was beautiful... This scene absolutely blew my mind. Shimmering sand and rocks, fall colors, calm water and a bridge! The photo doesn't really do it justice. The light was failing by the time we got there and my landscape photography skill leaves much to be desired... but this is still one of my favorite photos.

Here is another photo from Wakaw. The wide angle is an amazing lens, but it comes with a steep learning curve. Lately I've been trying to focus more on the composition of my photos. Since starting with the wide angle, I find myself back to square one. I have lots of (crooked) horizons smack in the middle of the photo, isolated subjects in the centre with distracting backgrounds, etc.

Right before sunset, the sun illuminated these hills, making the dry yellow bushes look like fires while the valley stayed in shadow. I like the contrast of shadows and light in this photo, and the appearance of the bushes. I couldn't salvage its composition no matter what kind of cropping I tried.

I have a billion things that I should be doing, but I couldn't let this evening slip by without taking the new lens for a spin. This wide angle lens is supposed to be the landscape photographer's weapon of choice. It sure doesn't disappoint! We went to a farm near Wakaw, SK. I was hoping for a spectacular sunset, but the sky foiled my plans by being, frankly, about as boring as it's possible for a sky to be. It didn't matter... There were more than enough things to photograph - marshes, hills, green pastures, and dandelion fields. If I had felt like swapping over to the macro, I would have had wildflowers, frogs and a couple of strange insects. There were also birds galore. I'll have to return before I move to Ontario - someday when I have more time, my rubber boots and some mosquito repellant!