Iceland pt.5 - Allsorts

 

More individual shots from the Iceland tour..

 

Humpback whale blowing water vapour into the morning Sun. 
An amazing couple of hours in Husavik bay, seeing a lot of Humpbacks, Minke and three massive Blue whales. 

 

 

A fumerol venting sulphurous gas through the Earths crust.  Taken using a tripod, soft edge ND grad and ND8 filter at f/22 to get a bit of blur into the steam and balance the sky "in camera".

Wild textures in a wild landscape. 
The wild colours in an Icelandic landscape can dominate the viewers attention, so I chose mono to amplify the focus on the shapes, textures and forms.
 

Sunset near Grenivik.  Taken at 00:26am and the Sun is still up behind the clouds!
Taken from a bayside hostel with proper cookers and even an outdoor hot tub!  Luxury.
Tripod, high aperture and 5second exposure to saturate those glorious colours and smooth out the water.
Two exposures composited - one for the sky and one for foreground.

 

Gannet flying alongside the ferry on the way north.  The only other wildlife en route was Puffins and Dolphins.
Dolphin spotting being a favourite game from our cabin bunks.

 

Grjotagja cave, underneath a rift in the surface thermal springs fill the pools with steaming water.
Used for bathing before local eruptions drove the temperature back up again.

 

Taken in a wide expansive valley known for its horses with a towering wall of mountains to the north.
Iceland bans importing livestock to preserve its native breeds.  These stocky horses are the only breed to be
found on the island and are a fairly common sight in the lowlands and plains.

 

 

 

 

The trans-Atlantic rift between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.
Moving apart about an inch per year may not sound much, but the wooden paths they built a few years ago where closed
because they'd been pulled apart and fallen into the rift!?  A lot of Icelandic construction is influenced by the knowledge that they will inevitably have to rebuild it in a couple of years. 

 

 

A long exposure of a part of Gullfoss.  Tripod, f/22, ND8 filter = 1/2s.  Plenty when the flow of water is so torrential!

 

 

A Redwing collecting food for its young, with a backdrop of the ever present blue Lupin that covers swathes of Iceland.
They breed in Iceland and some migrate to the UK in the autumn/winter.  Having made the trip in a big ferry over a number of days I can only be extremely impressed.

 

Flood plains at the mouth of a glacial valley in the south, where bridges are washed away so often we crossed several temporary ones that looked like the military had just put them up!
I knew exactly what I was going to do when I took this shot.  The landscape and contrasts were so dynamic I had to stop (which isn't always easy with narrow roads, raised up on banks to avoid snow in the winter).