Driving through the lava field surrounding Lake Myvatn really makes you feel as if you are in the land that time forgot. It’s really surreal. I spent ages at this spot, climbing lava stacks trying to get the image I was imagining. I never quite got it, but I like the patterns in the bottom of the pond captured here.
I was dragged out early this morning to visit a beach and take some sunrise photos. I’d been up late the night before and didn’t think I’d enjoy it. I’ve now remembered that I don’t need a lot of sleep. The morning actually yielded about 5 usable pictures. Pretty good really.
As I failed to post a photo last night, I decided I’d better post something particularly time-consuming to make up for it. Earlier, I checked Trey Ratcliff’s blog Stuck in Customs, where he’d posted a panorama and asked how often people use photomerge in Photoshop. I decided that a panorama would probably be a good option tonight.
So, here it is. This is To get the most of this photo, give it a click to see a larger version. It’s a composite of 7 HDR photos, so 21 in total. I batch process the bracketed images with Photomatix before combining them with photomerge.
“Warning, rocks have fallen from the ceiling before and they will fall again”, the sign read.
Could this small hole in the side of this immense lava flow, near Lake Myvatn, really be the entrance to the underground hot springs we’d been hearing about. If it wasn’t, and we were brained by falling rocks that really wouldn’t have felt worth it. Venturing further in we saw water. Then we recognized the familiar sulfur smell of a hot spring. Venturing inside we found a small cavern, beneath the basalt, housing a pool of hot water. Upon shining a light on it we discovered that it was crystal blue, much like the water in the caves here in Bermuda, but it was steaming.
At this point I wanted to tell you what it’s called but can’t find the name (I did find this video showing the entrance though, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj8Fu-si19Q )! I really need to start carrying a notebook. What I do know is that there were two caves. one is used by men, the other by women. We didn’t know which one we were in. In summer, the men’s is too hot to swim in. As we didn’t know which one we were in, we decided not to risk it.
*** Edit: Check out the comments, Charlotte has found the name for me! ***
Godafoss has to be in the running for the easiest waterfall to access in Iceland. There’s a gas station and souvenir store with a view to the falls and it was our first encounter with tour buses. They were all parked to the right of the falls. So we took this narrow path up the other side of the river and I found this cool little bridge. I recognized it from Trey Ratcliffe’s blog and was shocked to find it! I thought it was in the middle of nowhere. You can tell just how beaten the lesser path is. So much so that the bridge is broken! Even with the Tour buses and souvenir stores, the impressiveness of Godafoss is not diminished. Naturally pictures of this waterfall will follow, they’re just a bit trickier to process than this little old bridge.
I spent a lot of time last summer taking photos of sunsets off of the dock at my friends’ new house in Spanish Point. One day I decided to do something a bit different, so I went to take photos off the rocks on the other side of Spanish Point. The result, of photographing a tide pool there, has a weird abstract feel.
Sitting here, after taking this photo, I came to the conclusion that we were not going to make it to the bird cliffs at Latrabjarg. They are the furthest point of land in the direction this photo is looking in. As you can see, we still had a long way to go. It was still a great night with some pretty dramatic scenery. All of the photos I’ve released from Iceland thus far are from this night. It offered up the best sunset we had the entire time we were in Iceland.
I wish I could say that I’ve missed the past couple of day’s posts because I didn’t have any internet. Instead, we’ve just been operating on a pretty exhausting schedule. We’re about to finish our circumnavigation of the country. Yesterday, I realized that I could film a pretty cool time-lapse while driving using my wide angle lens, my back-up camera, intervalometer and a Nikon lens cap someone left in our jeep before we picked it up. I realized this yesterday, on our second last day. I could have had a video of the entire journey, but I only realized it yesterday. It’s alright though, it just means I’ll have to come back, I’m thinking for the whole month of June next year. We’ve been talking about how to spend a month here as it’s painfully expensive – we’re dropping about $100 on gas alone every day. The country’s full of free campsites, so I think on my return I’ll be sleeping in a tent. It’s good though, as there’s no need to meet check-in times and you can decide to stop whenever you get too tired to go on. Today we head to Reykjavik, after backtracking a bit to the glacier bay. It was cloudy and rainy yesterday and last night, so decided to leave photographing the crystal blue chunks of ice until the sun was out this morning. Tonight, we’ll be snorkeling the rift under the midnight sun and then possibly touring the Golden Circle, which will get us truly back on the tourist trail.
Back to Bermuda in a couple of days when I’ll actually get to process some Iceland photos! Here’s a shot from Bermuda taken a few weeks ago up at Ferry Reach.
Heading off to Husavik soon to go to the Phallological museum, whale museum and then out whale and puffin watching! Apparently they spotted blue whales two days ago. Hopefully they’re still about. Last night, we visited Lake Myvatn and it’s weird lava field surrounds, including an under ground hot spring that made for a pretty cool photo opportunity. Having a jeep paid off last night as our GPS directed us up a rough track, it didn’t look anything like a marked road. After driving a fair way in, the GPS beeped and asked if our car was suitable for that road. I have no idea how it can direct people up that road as most cars wouldn’t be able to take it.
This is the last of the photos that I have of Boulders Bay South Africa. I love the way these rocks have been carved by the elements. The tall skinny one jutting up feels like a modern, abstract sculpture.
If you’re interested in finding this “secret” viewpoint, I provide a few clues as to its location in Niagara Skyline. It’s a pretty cool spot to find, even if you’re not looking to photograph the area. It’s definitely a different view compared to what most visitors to the falls get to see. Once up there I decided I had to try to capture the whole scene. So, I framed up four different shots and bracketed each for HDR. I wasn’t positive at the time how I’d go about stitching them together.
It turned out it was pretty involved. I had a total of 28 photographs to work with. These 28 images could have produced 4 HDR photographs to then stitch together. This approach caused me all sorts of problems with ghosting. Another significant problem was setting the sliders in Photomatix so that they’d be optimized for all four images. I kept ending up with dark areas in the final result. So, I changed my tactic.
In order to get this to work, I wound up grouping the exposures for each image together – meaning that i had seven sets of four images ranging from -3 stops to +3 stops. I stitched each of these together to create 7 huge images that I could then run through Photomatix. Unfortunately, this pushed the limits of my computer’s capabilities and I kept encountering error messages due to insufficient memory. I had been trying to use Photomatix’s deghosting tool to clean up people and vehicles that had moved through the frame. Eventually, I decided I’d have to do this in Photoshop after producing the tone mapped image. This reduced workload appeased my computer, and I had an HDR image to work with!
I went into Photoshop and layered the seven original exposures under the tone mapped image and masked away any ghosting I could find. It was pretty time-consuming and I’ve spent ages trying to figure out how to do it, but I’m happy with the results. I’ll be producing more stitched panoramic images going forward. I’ve got an idea for another shot at the top of Horseshoe Bay using this technique. I’ll give it a try once the weather decides to behave itself again.
