Ice Caves & Shipwrecks - Winter Photography in Iceland

So I'm here now at this waterfall which is at the end of a canyon in Iceland and it's it's really amazing here. Now I've actually forgotten the name of the place. I'll check with the guide when we leave and I'll put it up on the bottom of the screen. But I've never been here before and it really is incredible. Now to get here we had to come along about 500 meters along this canyon which is a little bit challenging. It's a bit tricky. You need crampons because you're clambering over rocks, through water and quite often you're walking over snow which is over the top of the water. So you have to be very careful to make sure you're not going to go through the snow and fall into the stream. So it took us a bit of time to get here but every single corner that we came around the canyon was just incredible. You've got these stalagmites, stalactites, these frozen icicles hanging from the cave and it really is stunning. So we're trying to shoot it now and it's challenging because the dynamic range here is incredible. It's really quite dark but at the same time you've got these really really strong highlights in the water as you can see behind me. The video just can't deal with that. And also the patches of snow in the back of the cave. So we're having to do multiple exposures. We're doing like an exposure for the snow and exposure for the shadows and then another exposure with a neutral density filter to be able to blur the water to get about four or five seconds in the water. It's also really cramped here because there's not a lot of space to walk, not a lot of space to work. So we're having to work around each other. But it's just one of those places that when you come, even if the image doesn't turn out to be that good, being here has just been an absolute pleasure. It's an amazing place to be and I'm really really glad we came. It's well worth the effort. Now as it turned out this really wasn't that much of an image. The walk through the cave was absolutely fantastic and apparently there is a bigger waterfall further up the canyon but we couldn't get any further due to the water and the ice and this is as far as we got. Now compositionally here it's hard to avoid how small the waterfall actually is and shooting the scene really wide in order to include some other elements makes that waterfall seem even smaller. You can compose tighter around the waterfall but then you lose all the other elements of the scene that give it depth and perspective like the icicles and the snow on the far side of the canyon wall. And so like so much of composition there's a compromise here when choosing which elements to include and in the end I decided to shoot it wider in order to get these icicles that were hanging down from the roof because I really felt they gave context to the image and without them there was nothing in the image that really defined or made the waterfall special. But by including the roof and the far side of the canyon you at least got a feeling of the uniqueness of the place. Now unfortunately I couldn't do this in one frame even with the lens at its widest focal length so I had to shoot the image as a vertical panorama made up of four horizontal shots. Now as I said before this image had to be shot in multiple exposures for the dynamic range and each of the frames of the panoramas had to be captured with the three exposures. One for the shadows to ensure I had some detail in the dark parts of the cave. Now this exposure though meant that I lost detail in the highlights in the part of the cave where the light was hitting the snow so then I had to do another darker exposure to capture this. I didn't really worry about the water on either of these exposures because I knew that I was going to do a third exposure with a neutral density filter to blur the water and to give it a more ethereal feel. My main concern here was that I didn't clip the highlights in the bright part of the water and I found that for that particular frame five seconds at f11 worked perfectly. In processing I merged each exposure into a panorama and then each of the panoramas was blended together. The first two for the shadows and the highlights could be blended automatically but the long exposure for the water needed to be brushed in by hand using layers in Photoshop because automatic blending really doesn't work well when there are parts of the image moving like the water here. Now it's not an image that I'm at all that happy with certainly not a portfolio image but that's the reality of landscape photography. Portfolio images are the exception rather than the rule. There's never a guarantee of a memorable image but I really enjoyed just being out there shooting it being in the location and the walk up here was fantastic. Next time I'd like to see if we can get a little bit further up into the cave. So we spent last night in a place called Thorsmark. Now we're still in the highlands in Iceland but we've moved to a different part from where we were earlier at the trip and this morning we got up and we've hiked along this valley to this cave here. Now the hike along the valley was just incredible it's such an amazing valley just walking along through the fresh snow was pretty special and we got some really nice drone footage when we were walking along there. But basically all that was to get here to come to see this cave which I can't pronounce the name in Icelandic but I'm told that it means Trollsjaur. I'll put the name at the bottom and this is just a big frozen waterfall. I'll just tilt it down so you can see all the icicles and the waterfall tilting down. Now places like this are generally pretty hard to shoot because you can't get any perspective so the first thing that you need to do is have a really really wide angle. So we had a wide angle and we tilted the camera as far back as we could to try to get so we're almost shooting part of the image is actually shooting vertical. So we've got these icebergs hanging down but with a really distorting the perspective. But what you also need is something to give it scale. So what we did was Andrea kind of put on crampons and scrambled up onto this rock here so he could stand underneath the waterfall and give the whole image some scale. Now we're here with a guide who knows what he's doing and he was pretty much guiding us all the way letting us know what we could do what we couldn't do what was safe because otherwise I think we would have been taking it would have felt like we're taking risks and this isn't something that I'd have wanted to do without a guide if we were here on our own. But it worked pretty well I'm not quite sure how the shots going to come out yet but being here it's an amazing place there's so much light just all the ice around us and it's well gonna walk out now and that's gonna be a lot of fun. With this image I was really trying to communicate the scale and the drama of the place. This frozen waterfall in a cave with light entering at the top there are a lot of things to consider compositionally. Shooting the scene really wide ensures that the whole of the cave is included in the frame and by tilting the camera back the scale is really accentuated we get this feeling of looking up into the light which emphasizes the light coming down into the cave. So I cut off the less interesting part at the bottom and made sure that the entire open roof of the cave was included in the frame. It was important that this wasn't cut in half because this hole in the ceiling acts as a focal point because it's so bright it's where the eye is naturally drawn to so it's important that it's fully realized and also having it complete makes it clear that this is actually a cave rather than a canyon. With wide angle images leading lines are always a strong compositional element and here I've used the implied leading line of the light and the brightly lit snow as well as the icicles hanging from the ceiling. Now usually with a wide angle shot like this I'm outside with the sky being a major element in the top half of the composition so the leading lines are mostly in the bottom half of the image however here inside this cave the composition has a different organization with the cave in the top of the frame which gives me the opportunity to use these icicles as leading lines. Now this affected the composition because I wanted to make sure the icicles weren't cut off at the edge of the frame. The final element of the composition is a figure and without it the image loses all of its scale and it's hard to see how big the cave is but the image works as a focal point and also that splash of red it contrasts with the cool feel of the cave. His position it's important here he's standing facing the light that's entering the cave and this connects the two focal points together and the other thing about the composition here was choosing where we stood very carefully to avoid being beneath these icicles in case they fell. They're at least four meters long and weigh hundreds of kilos so you really don't want to be underneath them if they fall. As we walked along the valley to the canyon I'd seen some fall from nearby cliffs and the noise they made as they hit the ground is absolutely astonishing. So inside the cave we made sure we weren't beneath any of them just in case. Now even though we weren't beneath the icicles there was still lots of water constantly dripping from the ceiling and as I had the lens pointed almost vertically up I had to constantly clean drops of water off the front element of the lens and to make sure I had a clean shot I took a lot of different frames at the different exposures because I was shooting an exposure for the shadow detail and an exposure for the highlight detail and I knew that if water dropped on the lens on one of these frames and probably I'd have another similar frame which I could use instead of it and blend them together and know that I'd always be able to have to merge them together to have a completely clean frame. We'd been in the highlands for three days now and it'd been an incredible experience but the next day it was time to head south to the coast and back to civilization where we were going to spend the next part of the trip. The south coast of Iceland is one of the most visited parts with some spectacular but also really well-known locations but there are though some still lesser-known places to be explored. The whole of the south coast has waterfalls that run off from the glaciers that take up much of the south of the country and some of them like this ones are ones that I've passed so many times and barely noticed but in the winter everything looks different and the snow and ice bring a new perspective to everything. Also on the southern coast is this old shipwreck now there's not much left of it and when we were passing it was close to the middle of the day which is the worst time for coastal photography because the light is so harsh. But this far north the light is quite low in the winter so I decided to have a go at capturing the image here. So situated in the middle of the black sand beach and with the water quite far off there isn't an obvious composition there's no real foreground. I tried shooting it wide from really up close and there are elements about this composition that I like and I thought that it worked quite well in black and white but it wasn't quite right for me I couldn't find a way to include the islands of Vestmannaeyjar which are behind in the background. So for this I found that walking further away from the wreck and shooting it with a long lens gave me some telephoto compression of the islands which pulled them a little bit closer to the wreck and gave the frame just that extra element of interest. I also used a neutral density filter here to slow down the water and blur the waves a little bit which gave me a four second exposure. Now too much action in the waves would have made the water a little bit too distracting but I felt with this blur the water the texture of the water actually matched the smooth texture of the sky better. Now again neither of these are portfolio images the light was way too harsh for that but I did really like the location and when I return to Iceland for the workshops next year this is certainly a place that we'll visit again at sunset. So I think that's it for this video I hope it's been interesting and I hope it's been useful and as always thanks so much for watching and the best of luck with your photography. See you next time and take care.