Going to Iceland? Here are some interesting experiences for the photographer or traveller.

This was a memorable trip. Iceland offer a variety and beauty of landscapes that is simply mind-blowing. Landscapes are expansive horizontally while having a vigorous mountainous background generously sprinkled with waterfalls. The colors of the grass and moss are vivid, maybe because the contrast against black sand or dark volcanic rocks and materials. For the photographer this is as close to heaven as it is possible on earth. You can judge by looking at my Iceland Gallery.

The country is basically a bunch of volcanoes coming from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean  in the middle of the Northern part. Being so north in latitude means lots of snow that gets compacted into glaciers which happen to be on top of volcanoes. When they erupt the lava and materials go through the ice and crystallize by the sudden cooling creating a dust that is like sandpaper. Sometimes the eruption happens beneath the glacier, melting the ice until the water has to go somewhere and when it does, it sweeps away anything it finds in its path. 

Iceland is the youngest land on earth; new land is created every time there is a volcanic eruption.

Extensive areas are covered by black materials, ash, lava rocks, volcanic materials and their resulting black sand. No wonder why Hollywood has taken notice and is filming more and more in Iceland.

Prometheus, the movie that is NOT supposed to be Aliens 1 was filmed there. Same for Batman Begins, Die Another Day and the upcoming Ben Stiller movie “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to be released next year.  It is like being in a different planet that is inhospitable yet beautiful.

One thing that would be obvious to North Americans is the almost complete lack of advertisement and other signs. Your sight can be filled with the landscape and its weird beauty without being interrupted by some view of the latest burger combo deal. This is great for the photographer or even the normal traveller. I hope that the Icelandic government maintains the landscapes without those visually polluting annoyances. The last think anyone wants are mechanical yellow arches on top of a glacier. BTW, although Icelanders do eat lots of burgers, hot dogs and other North American foods, it is hard to find the typical fast food chains there.

I spent 8 days there and drove over 2100 km of driving. The map below shows the main route with the green thingies showing the nightly stops or destinations, the orangy ones shows the clusters of my geotagged photographs.

So why Iceland?

Well, there is no other place in the planet that I am aware of that you can drive the same day into a inactive volcano caldera, see beautiful waterfalls, drive by several glaciers, lava fields park your car then, walk to them. There is no other place where you can be on a glacier in the morning and taking a natural geothermal bath in the afternoon, where you can see geysers, black beaches and fiords all at driving range. If you like nature, studied geology, geography or just appreciate the wonders of nature, then you should visit Iceland. You will not regret it. You will be rewarded with some of the most spectacular landscapes on earth, all at your reach in just few days. If you know about some other place like this, please let me know because I want to see it.

Tips For the Photographer enthusiast

Let’s start with the equipment, here is what I took and recommend (see included photo) :

1. A shower cap to cover your camera when rains. Trust me, at certain point you WILL need it. I used plastic bag as substitute, because I did not read a post like this one (see the photo below). Alternative you can purchase a off-the-shelf one for few dozen dollars.
2. Tripod to make your shots sharp.
3. ND filter (8X) to produce the silky texture of waterfalls.
4. CP Filter to enrich the colors (I never used it though)
5. UV Filter to minimize the haze normally produced with distance
6. Additional battery or batteries. The last thing you want is to run out of them after hiking few km to get close to a glacier, waterfall or volcano
7. Layers of clothing, including a wind-breaking-water-proof-coat. Trust me, eventually you will get wet. This tip do not apply to Canadians, we know how to dress for cold weather.
8. GPS Tracker to geotag your photos and to get a track log of your routes.
9. Panoramic head if you have it and if not, make one. The manual method is not always good enough.
10. A macro lens. The small berries and colorful flowers that grow along the moss, moraines and black soils are beautiful and unique. Anybody, can easily spend hours capturing the different naturally occurring flower bouquets. You entire Iceland photo gallery can be of just this kind.
11. Warm hat or toque, gloves and SCARF!!!
12. A notebook and additional backup drive to backup your photos.
13. The normal stuff e.g. battery charger, blower, cables, triggers,etc.

The weather…..

Weather in Iceland is moody and whimsical, if you get good light shoot as soon as you can, it may last seconds, literally. My most sour experience with this was at Jokulsarlon, in our way back to Reykjavik, we stopped there around 9:00 am, the sun was just rising, the light was warm and oblique producing long shadows, there was no wind and therefore the lagoon acted as a mirror for perfect reflections. When I saw it, I grabbed my camera and ran, I took about 3 exposures and that was it! The sun was gone! I waited for about an hour, it was teasing all those unhappy people with cameras that were waiting. 

It finally gave us few more seconds but now with wind, the perfect mirror was gone. So, whenever you get the opportunity, take it. DO NOT think that you may have another better time. It could easily turn for worse. What is worse than poor light? Rain. 

When rains, you lose all visibility, the tall mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, etc all disappear. Rain is also normally accompanied by wind which makes it almost impossible for photography. 

Ok, enough for today, next week… Icelandic quirks and oddities. Stay tuned.

Feel free to connect with me in Facebook or Twitter

About Photographic Painting…

(As appeared in the “featured guest” page in the Markham Arts Council (MAC))
August 14, 2012 · by Markham Arts Council · in Featured Guest

Very early in my life I developed a deep appreciation for classic paintings. During the Renaissance, masters like Brunelleschi and 

Caravaggio developed perspective, chiaroscuro and other techniques that allow paintings to be more like today’s photographs. I have always loved these paintings, their rendering and interpretation of passages from Greek and roman mythology allowed me to visualize these wonderful stories of gods, nymphs, centaurs and heroes. Although I have some drawing skills, I never learned drawing or painting techniques, something that personally I believe is necessary to be a painter. This may well be the reason why I embraced photography.  Maybe in my subconscious I see the camera as my brushes, colors, pigments and canvas. This is how I came up with the idea of producing painting-like images with a photographic camera, which I call “photographic painting” for short.

Photographic painting has become a wonderful part of my life. I truly enjoy the time I spend in studying the masters’ paintings, researching about what objects they used, location, their use at the time and their meaning in the painting. It takes quite a bit of reading and research and thus is also a learning and educational experience. The history and stories behind the paintings become layers on top of the aesthetical and visual aspect of it.

Once I have decided what paintings I want to photographically paint; I look for the objects that I need to use or decided to use for those particular pieces. This is not an easy task, the masters of the Dutch Golden Age used XVII Century objects; finding similar ones today is very difficult if not impossible without spending fortunes to acquire them. In many cases I had to “make” them; which normally means that I modified existing objects to look like XVII Century ones.

The biggest challenge though comes at the photographing time. Painters have no restriction on lighting, they can simulate light sources whether truthful or not, they can exaggerate angles and fake perspective (M.C. Escher being a great example of this). This is not the case with photography, you can modify lighting, add, take away, but you can’t fake it.  The same applies to perspective and what fits in a frame. There is no other way except through painful experimentation that normally entitles taking many, many exposures.

Another really difficult aspect is to achieve that painting look using artificial lighting while arranging the composition like the painting.

For every exposure, I would have to find the right angle both horizontally and vertically to match the perspective, then arrange a table or space with props, constantly comparing to the source painting, then take the photo, look through the camera, zoom in and realize that maybe the overlapping of a tazza and a roemer was not the same, or a lemon peel (very common in these paintings) was not where is supposed to be, or a glass was off in terms of distance, the folds of the table cloth are not right, etc. For every exposure, I would move the objects a bit, go through the review process and snap again. It normally takes between 10 to 40 exposures before I am satisfied.

At the end, when I look at the final image and I believe I have captured the essence of the painting, then comes the reward. I feel like being part of that master’s creation on my own terms, a wonderful and fulfilling feeling indeed.

5 Minutes with Levin Rodriguez
MAC: Can you give us a little insight on your educational background and what initially inspired you to start recreating paintings?
I explained that at the beginning of the post.


MAC: Your blog (http://levinrodriguez.blogspot.ca) is called “The Berkemeyer Project”. What exactly does “Berkemeyer” refer to?
 
A Berkemeyer is a type of glass very common in XVII Century Dutch Republic (the glass I am holding in the portrait at right). I thought about using “Berkemeyer” because I wanted to spark curiosity which in your case I think worked. My blog used to be called “My Photo Life”, but then I realized that it shouldn’t be about me since I am not that interesting, but about this “photographic painting” theme that I care much more about and it may be more interesting to others who love classic art, specifically painting.

MAC: What is your ultimate objective in photographic painting? What do you hope to translate to the viewers?
 
I have reproduced several classic paintings to a credible level but I see this as a phase in a longer journey, I have now entered a new phase where I use the masters’ style or identifiable compositions but I incorporate my own components to make it my own. 
 
I also like to “extend “if you will some of the masters’ scenes, I have now produced at least two of these images. They are based in famous paintings by Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer, but I have removed the humans. 

They are meant to show few moments after the person left the scene, I have incorporated clues about what they did. The viewer will be stimulated to think about that, as such the image now has an evolving story behind it and thus becoming more meaningful. 

I have included one of these images, this one based on Vermeer’s iconic painting “The Milkmaid” or “The Kitchen Maid”. There is a description in the following linked photo.
MAC: Which piece of work did you have the most fun creating and why?
 
Like most photographers, I always, always love the most my last creation, the one that I took just two minutes ago.

MAC: A quote/ artist/ piece of work that you live by?
 
I appreciate many forms of visual and performing arts. If I have to make the difficult choice of picking favorites, I would award the prize to Peter Paul Rubens for his interpretation of Greek myths, Jan Vermeer for the courage of producing his almost entire “oeuvre” in one room and Caravaggio for his amazing light treatments.

Copyright.Levin Rodriguez. All Rights Reserved. www.LevinRodriguez.net