The Most Beautiful Thing I've Ever Seen - Disko Bay

Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. Visit squarespace.com slash Brendan Vanson for more details. What's going on guys? It is 7 in the morning here in Copenhagen, and I am on my way to Greenland, so let's go find Greg and get flying. It's been a year since my scouting trip to Greenland showed just how special this place is for travel photography and just in general. So I'm insanely excited to have my first official Greenland photography tour on the way, and it looks like Greg is too. Hello! Can you please keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times? The flight from Copenhagen to Greenland is much more of a slog than most people realize. It's not just a hop. You're crossing continents. We're headed to North America. In fact, most people don't realize this, but Canada and Greenland actually share a land border on Hans Island. And the distance from mainland Greenland to Ellesmere Island in Canada is only about 30 kilometers. Okay, so just made it to Kangarooswag. I can never pronounce it properly, but we're here and leaving the big plane behind, and we're about to jump on a little baby plane like that little Bombardier. We pop through a light drizzle of rain and hop over fjords, tarnspeckled hills, and dip down into the town of Ilulissat. Easily the fastest growing tourism destination anywhere in Greenland, and on approach, it's easy to see why. Made it to Ilulissat. The view coming in was incredible. Massive, massive glacier and icebergs. It was just really cool. So I'm really excited to get into town. I've never been here before. It's, uh, I'm tired. I'm really tired. I'm turning into a baby. Yeah, yeah, I'm turning into a baby. I'm also a little bit of a baby with the weather. It's a little bit of a shock going from 30 degrees in Portugal to like 3 degrees here. So I'm cold, and I'm a little bit tired, and the weather's not great, and I'm happy. Don't get me wrong, but I think rather than run around shooting photos tonight, I think we're gonna just go for a little walk, see what we see. Yeah, I left all my camera gear behind because I was like, yeah, I'm tired, and the weather's not great. Literally went up the hill from the hotel and looked off, and there's this band of beautiful golden light and huge-ass icebergs that way. So immediately turning around, getting my camera gear. I broke rule number one of being a travel photographer. Rule number one is that you should always photograph a place as soon as you arrive. You have the freshest eyes. You're not desensitized to what makes it unique yet, and you're most excited about the things you see. Okay, so I have some regrets, but one of them is not coming out tonight. It's absolutely awesome with the ice catching light. The regret is that I only brought on this trip, for some reason, my 70-200, I didn't bring the 100-400, and here at this ice, all of the cool photos seem to be like 200-400, 200-500 millimeters. There's two of the famous red sailboats way off on an iceberg that way. My lens just wasn't enough. The light is really, really cool. You've got kind of this thin gap where the sunlight is just pushing through and it's creating this beautiful, soft, there's just like golden glow to it. It's really, really cool. So absolutely no regrets coming out tonight, but a little bit of regret that I didn't bring my long lens. And now you've got the sunset cruise heading into the ice. So I don't know, maybe that makes another subject. My buddy Max let me use his 500 millimeter lens so I could grab at least one photo of the famous sailboat. Then I have to swap back to Max 200 millimeters. The way the light is though, I think this more cinematic type image and crop actually works best. So I'm not mad about it. I spend the rest of the evening kind of in a daze. I'm not even sure why, but I'm brain foggy and feeling jet-lagged. Looking back at the footage, I'm kind of like, I don't even remember most of that. So while I only got maybe one or two decent frames out of the evening, I'm not mad about it. Okay, yesterday was fun. I was exhausted, so tired. But it was still worth it to get out. Now we're just passing kind of like a dog sled village. You can probably hear the dogs. And we're gonna go on a walk basically to where you can see the ice and get right on top of the ice. So that's where we're headed. And I didn't really bring any camera gear. Kind of just out for a bit of a recce, a bit of a wander. The tourism infrastructure here in Ilulissat is advanced for Greenland and the trail system is awesome. Much of Greenland I've explored to date has kind of a do-it-yourself vibe to it, where you kind of just need to find your own paths. So this is a treat. As we arrive to the ice, I'm blown away by the vastness of it. It's just mountain-sized icebergs surrounded by bergy bits with very little space for water left in between. It almost feels like you could hop and skip your way across it. At a certain spot, a wall of ice stretches out of the rock. So I asked Max to head out and wander around to see if I can use him for scale in a photo. So the weather hasn't been good all day today, but we decided to hike out anyway to see, you know, just a location scout really to be honest. And so we've come down what they call the yellow trail here, and you have all this just incredible ice off this way. But it's not an ideal composition, really, to be honest. You have a piece of ice off to the right, which could be a decent anchor, but then you have the cliff line leading kind of away from your shot. And yeah, it's just a bit of an empty space. So I don't know how I'm gonna solve this from a photography standpoint. The normal way I'd solve this is by finding some sort of foreground element. Maybe just some like this red moss or whatever it is. Something like that. I don't know. Am I the only one who kind of gets stressed out about places like this? It's so freaking beautiful that I'm just constantly aware of the fact that no photo I will ever take will be able to communicate that. And so I search for a photo, but I can't come up with anything and I give up on my idea. Yeah, so after basically walking around this whole little area trying to find a composition I liked, they all just feel underwhelming. I think we're just too far away from the best ice over there. So I think I'm going to do something I normally don't do and I'm going to pull out my 70-200 and I'm just going to photograph long lens detail-ish. Maybe not even detail-ish stuff, but just long lens images. This was the right move. Taking out the longer lens allows me to narrow my field of focus and simplify things. I mean a place like this the beauty isn't complicated. So the photos don't need to be either. A humpback whale fishes through the sober waters. It's surrounded by blue anvils of ice. Delicate light filters through woollen clouds and etches out the details of the bergs. Occasionally a boat passes through to showcase the skyscraper scale of these gigantic pieces of ice. This place is magic. Overnight a storm blows through town. It starts as a gentle flicker of sleet and rain, but it eventually builds to an all-out dumping of heavy snow that coats town and traps us indoors. But almost as fast as it rolled in the weather clears and we're free again to meander, take pictures, or swim in the below freezing waters. What the f... What is wrong with these people? Ice man! Oh, I'm actually numb though. Hands are absolutely freezing cold. August 31st 2024. Let's go baby. Travel photography. Let's go. Obviously delirious, Greg puts clothes back on and we head out once again. Okay, so kind of crazy. Yesterday we've kind of got snowed out. You can still see there's still some snow on the ground here in Ilulissat. Ilulissat. I can never pronounce things. Here in Ilulissat there was like a foot of snow and it's August 31st today. So it would have been August 30th yesterday. Just crazy. Today it was still snowing, but we went out and tried to get some photos of the snowy situation. Greg went for an ice bath. And now on our last evening here, we're going on to a boat and we're gonna go cruising for icebergs. So this should be fun. You ready for a boat ride? What was the question? The question was are you guys ready to see some epic ice? Yes. Yes, you are. That's why you're here. Don't forget to like and subscribe and all that other nonsense. We skim into Disco Bay. Over the past couple years this has gone from a relatively unknown place to one of the most famous photography locations on the planet. Disco ball ice sits like slush on the surface of freezing cold waters that only people who have actually lost their minds would ever intentionally go swimming in. One of the famous things that people have been photographing here in Ilulissat is the red sailboats and there's these two red sailboats that are almost here all summer. What I do know is they do make really really good photos because they just contrast so well these red sails. It's like the red jacket in the landscape. You get the red sails with the ice. Absolutely beautiful. So we're quite lucky today in that they are here floating around the ice with us. It's a little bit cliche to be photographing them, but it's so beautiful that like how can you not? The captain of our ship seethed the touch of jealousy when we asked about the red sailboats. It seems they get a lot of attention around here and why not? I mean look at these things. They are the wildest contrast to an already special scene. As they carve through the blue raspberry slurpy waters the light pinches through their punchy red sails in perfection. But the sailboats can be a bit of a distraction to the natural beauty here too. I heard one of my tour members say, okay, I think I have about 5,000 photos of the red sails. Let's find something else. And we did. I really haven't been filming anything because I've just been so overwhelmed by how awesome this is. I've done a lot of iceberg photography, Svalbard, Antarctica. I think this is the best I've ever done. Disco Bay is insane. You just have these really massive unique ever-changing icebergs all over the place. Reflections. And then on top of it, we also have a little bit of light. There's some reflecting filtered light coming through and bouncing into some of the pieces of ice and the cliff walls of ice. And it's just like overwhelmingly beautiful to the point that I don't even know what to photograph. Whoa, look at that. Look at that. Sorry. There's a huge, oh my god. I might have to show you somebody else's photo because my camera's inside. There's the most beautiful thing I think I've ever seen in my life up there. It is just a giant piece of ice with sunset light glowing it up. I don't know if a photo will even make this look as it is. That is just pure insanity. I'm gonna see if we can get the driver to drive that way. Oh my god. Yeah, no way a photo can do this justice. Maybe if I printed it 10 feet wide. But still, that was maybe the most beautiful thing I've seen in my life. As the sun continues to set, we sneak through the breaks in the icebergs and set our camera lenses on basically anything. It's overwhelming. Like a cabaret of nature playing out all around you as you just stand there with your camera to your eye and your jaw to the floor. Yeah, so this was awesome. It's still a little bit of sunset-ish going on. I don't know if I've taken a single good photo. I've taken a lot of photos. Like a lot of photos. But I don't know if any of them have been that good because it's just sometimes in photography when things are so beautiful and so impressive, it's just overwhelming and you don't know what to do. You just get like overcome by how beautiful things are and that's definitely how it's felt here. Among the ice and in the sunset light and it's just been absolutely phenomenal on Disco Bay and yeah, forget the red sailboats. They were cool. But this ice and this sunset, definitely cooler. Even if maybe they don't make as unique a photo. So that's it from Oh, what's that? Oh, it's another boat. Never mind. And the next video is still from here in Greenland. We're heading towards Sissamut. See you there. Peace! And now from the sponsor. Squarespace is a great place to build your photography website and business. It gives you all the tools you need to get rolling, including the new Design Intelligence, which combines two decades of design expertise with cutting-edge AI technology that'll help empower you to build the perfect site for you. Through your website on the Squarespace platform, you can also invoice clients, accept payments, and build an online store. There's even a scheduling platform, which will save you time when booking and organizing client jobs. To get started, visit squarespace.com slash brendanvansen for more details and a 10% discount off your first purchase.