Here is a shot of my friend Asmundur who took me around Iceland on the weekend to take a few shots. He showed me some cool places and was a great host. Here is a shot of him in full concentration mode on the southern rocky coast at Sunset. Underneath that is a repost of the first place Asmundur took me… to that unusual light house about an hour away from this location.

The ice near the town square gave off an interesting purple glow during dusk. I think it was the warm colors from inside the buildings mixing with that strange blue light from the long winter dusk.

I do appreciate all the testimonials I get, and it often gives me a chance to go look at other photographers and whatnot… So I am always surprised when one of my favorites photographers comes by and gives me one of her own. I uploaded this picture of this icy lake in Iceland, since that is where Helga is from, and I am jealous she gets to live there all year round. Here is a link to her one of her Flickr portfolios.

Here are a few whale hunters.

There was still a little snow and frost on the ground on this early morning when I walked around Reykjavik to get some shots. It was one of of those days I was happy to wake up before sunrise. The cloud cover was perfect for surreal HDR time!

supporter:
Do you like the house in Trey’s photograph? Are you thinking about constructing a house?  If you’ve ever thought about designing a house you must first start the plans with what kind of house frame you want.   For help with planning for your home click here.

During the middle of winter, there was not a lot of light during the day, but the dusk seemed to last for about two hours. So it was very nice to get the strange deep blue light in so many of my shots. I think it really came out as a nice backdrop color for all the warm colors and architecture in and around Reykjavik.

Everything in Iceland reminded me of the Genesis project from Star Trek. I half expected to find Spock huddling in a bush going through Pon’Far.

Here is a huge geothermal plant from Iceland that was built on top of some the most active hot spots in the country. It was a very surreal place and we were able to walk right up to do it, around it, and all through it. We never saw another human the whole time. It reminded of that book Sun of Suns when they visited the artificial sun that was a self-sustaining device that no one really understood. The sounds of the turbines churning and the excess steam exhaust was rather unreal as well…

Below that, I posted another shot about 2 KM from the plant where everything was untouched and still natural.

I thought everyone would enjoy a rather miraculous capture that has risen from my trip to Iceland.

All I can say is this picture was incredibly lucky, because there has been no reason heretofore for God to make sure the clouds were perfectly aligned on this cool spring day to allow this kind of capture. I’m not complaining, of course.

I used a new technique on this shot that is beyond what I detail in my HDR 2.0 Tutorial. I discussed the technique with the author of that HDR book that is coming out soon that will feature a bit of my work. Perhaps I should not steal my own thunder and leave it a mystery until then. A mystery, like the resurrection, no?

This was shot a bit after sunset at the docks in Reykjavik. The boats were rolling in with the sweet scent of whale, our friends from the sea, opened up an blubbering all over the place. I think the ships get so heavy and full-o-whale, that they keep a fleet of these tugs handy.

Beneath the picture of the tug boat is a picture that I sensationally called an Icelandic Battleship. Of course, it is nothing of the sort. It’s merely a Dutch Coast Guard ship, but it looked fairly imposing in the cramped Reykjavik harbor.

This is a portion of the Blue Lagoon in Iceland just after dusk. The water was a hot and steamy milky-white, filled with all kind of nutrients and minerals. At this time of night, there was hardly anyone inside, so I felt like less lecherous walking around a swimming pool with my camera.

This is Hallgrimskirkja, and I think this is the coolest church I have ever seen. I could not find a bad angle for this thing. The shape seemed to be pleasing to my math sense from whichever direction I composed the shot.

I have posted a shot of the interior underneath. I call it “The Haunting Hull of the Viking Longboat” or somesuch. I forget this grandiloquent names over time, but it was something to that effect.

I enjoyed exploring the wiles of Iceland on this strangely-clouded day. It made for idyllic settings for ruin-hunting. I always expected to find Eric the Red’s skeleton inside, holding a few gold coins and a treasure map, but nothing of the sort happened. In fact, all that happened was I got back into a leather-seated car and ate a Snickers bar.

Here is another one of these unusual-looking horses from Iceland. When Rebekka took me out to the fjords to go shoot horses, I did not expect that the horses would be nearly so hairy. I was thinking it might have been seasonal because of the cold, but then again, I have very little business determining anything about Icelandic wildlife.

Also, I installed Twitter because it was all the rage at SXSW last week. I think I like it, but I am not sure yet. It seems a good way to keep up with my friends during bored moments. You never know when someone will say something interesting.

Lastly, in an unrelated thing, a member of my Global IP SWAT team found this picture that Kodak has apparently used without my permission. I have posted the picture of Chicago they are sheepish stealing below the horse’s sheepy legs.

supporter:
Do you want to photographs like Trey’s?  Grab your camera and learn how to take professional photos.  Visit a photography workshop and learn tools of the trade.  Workshops are a useful place to learn information on photography.

Getting to this exact spot without slipping was something only a penguin could do.

Imagine hard packed ice that is somewhere between the density of diamond and a collapsed star that is covered with a fine mist at 32.01 degrees. And then imagine walking on that in tuxedo shoes. Also, you are carrying an eight pound camera with a tripod that has roughly the same dimensions and weight as a flagpole.

But, all in all, this turned out very nice, with the ice-green glacier in the background.

I knew if I took enough HDR pictures of churches that I would eventually get a miracle. You know, the odds are technically and scientifically in my favor. The sound the miracle made was about the same sound as when they hit that emergency switch in the hatch on Lost.

This one was a five-exposure HDR. The cloud streaks were subtle, but nice, and the tone mapping certainly helped them to pop.

This was taken from inside the cemetery, whose egress was made through this nice little white gate.

Thanks for all my fans and all the nice comments/emails - I know I have a bunch of unique and interesting people that come to the site!

For you, and because I am still bitter at my mortal enemy, FlickrBlog, for beating me in the Bloggies, I’ve decided to re-tagline the blog and redesign it a bit. I am still messin’ with a few things, but I decided to supersize this son of a gun. Why not? Hey it’s 2007. I know most of you have big monitors and bigger bandwidth. And besides, photographs are meant to see large, eh?

So as for this picture… I’ve never been one of those people that can easily see shapes in clouds. Nor am I one of those people that can pass a Rorschach Test without being immediately thrown in jail for something I might have done.

But in this picture, I think I see a genie coming out of that geothermal vent. This was shot in Iceland on a *rather* chilly day.

Lighthouses are always cool, and this one especially so. The colors in Iceland always come out very nice and dreamy for some reason. Maybe it’s the elves, or maybe it is the excessive alcohol. Or maybe there is something hallucinogenic in all that rotten shark. Fermenting shark meat probably has toxic effects that are rarely researched by the FDA.

This lighthouse is called Hólmabergsviti. It is in the south of Iceland along the craggy shore.

Even junkyards in Iceland have a certain stark beauty. This junkyard was behind an old abandoned farmhouse and everything rusted into nice shades and colors that seemed perfect for this kind of shot.

If I could describe the amount of wind that was whipping around the top of this volcano, then I am sure my hallowed words would make even the most hardened weatherman weep.

This was taken just as the sun climbed over the ridge of this caldera, an old volcano that collapsed into itself and has now formed a frozen lake inside the top. I am glad I had a heavy tripod because a lesser one would have first frozen like the T2000 in liquid nitrogen, then would immediately shatter into a million pieces, blowing itself off the mountain. I liked taking this shot for the same reason Stephen Wright likes to hit himself in the head with a hammer — it felt so good when I stopped.

There is Will, in his baleen glory, standing, arms askew in stay-puft falling pose, in front of the ocean on the southern coast of Iceland. You can tell from the ratio of Will’s impressive stature the immense size of the waves in the distance. I was hoping an errant wave might come hit Will, just for the comedy factor (and the potential photo-op).

I am sure there were bodies here at some point, but not any more. This is an overgrown seaside shack in the southern part of Iceland. It was kind of creepy with the whipping wind and the creaking old wood.
While I was shooting, I had one of those feelings that I was not supposed to be there, not entirely unlike my time tonight at a Chinese wedding dinner in Kuala Lumpur (where I currently am). Everyone was shouting and singing in Chinese and people were bring me pig heads and singing John Denver in Karaoke.

It’s not really a cube at all. That is obvious. But what is not obvious is that the incredibly nice and accommodating Asmundur took me out to some of these cool places around southern Iceland. It was fantastic spending going shooting with him and I appreciate his techniques and stylings.

There are a lot of these little ruins scattered around Iceland. I think they are not as old as the look, but the wind and winter conditions are so harsh there, I think everything gets weathered much faster than normal.

This is the sort of place where they bury shark… which eventually led to me eating rotten shark, which is a delicacy there. About this, I am not kidding. Ask Will. He is deadly serious all the time.

“Hey no one has ever shot me in action before,” she said while holding a camera in glacier-wind with bare hands.

“What do you mean by ‘in action’?” I asked, fully gloved.

“I mean with a horse,” she said in a matter-of-fact way.

“I saw something like that in Mexico,” I proffered.

She looked confused, so I assumed she wanted me to shoot her with these horses… so here she is. It was either this, or in a willowy gown wading into a tidal pool while elves threw fairy dust into the Aurora… That one is coming up later.

For those of you not on Flickr, you may not know the “sensation” that is Rebekka, but she is one of the few that has been elevated to an elite class of super-Flickr-celebrities. She got so popular that Toyota asked her to do a series of advertisements for the Prius that are shown all over Iceland. She gets lambasted for posting too many pictures of herself, but she says, “Who could I possibly convince to come stand on a glacier at midnight in Iceland and wear a tiny dress?”

This shot below was taken out in a fjord area of Iceland where the horses ran free… or fairly free. They had no fear of humans, and apparently no fear of Americans.

These colors are real.

Every bubbly and steamy pool throughout the geothermal areas has a unique and Martian coloring, whether it is bubbling up mud or whatever kind of hell-juice spews out of the earth. Every steam vent bellows a strange and gruesome scent.

It was very tempting to dip my hand in there to feel the water… or even take off my clothes into my Euro-tight-undies to slip into a dense mineral bath… but I decided that it was probably a bad idea. I imagined my mom was there, advising against such an action.

Is Iceland the coolest place on Earth? Yes.

Where else can you find things like this, frozen in time, preserved in an earthen mound under the frigid tundra… this old viking longboat, stored in perfect condition, still lit by wall torches, and used as an inverted church. What a place…

…cuz I felt a little ill… When I saw all the pictures of the jockeys that were there before me… Ahh yes… nothing says Icelandic fjord and horse exploration like the great poet, Prince, which is O< —-< in ASCII.

Seriously, thanks to Rebekka for a great day tooling around the fjords of Iceland. We were going to take a tunnel under the fjord, but it is one of her mega phobias, along with spiders, and drunk Icelandic men. (We share the latter)

Here I will post one of my favorite pictures of hers… this is her son jumping off a swing. I’m not sure how this picture is possible, but she has a bunch like this:

I found a nice bench and sat there for about an hour, drinking coffee, with my hand on the remote control. Oh, here come some more birds… snap snap… have some coffee… look there’s the sun… more birds now… snap snap snap… coffee is good… better increase that ISO those birds are fast… look at those clouds… more birds… snap snap… is this place real? snap… omg how am I going to process all these pictures… snap snap… thank god I have a lot of memory cards…. okay now the sunrise is even better… why did I waste those earlier shots? More birds… go slower please birds.. snap… coffee running low… okay time to move on I have a meeting soon… okay one more snap.

Here is an old engine I found out in the frozen tundra of Iceland. It was a bit out of commission, and it was too heavy to bring back home in my bag. I have a feeling that it would have set off the buzzer when I walked through the metal detector.

The southern edge of Iceland is some of the roughest and most beautiful ocean surf I have ever seen. Standing on igneous rock, wind ripping around me, and the surf crashing in every direction was incredibly intimidating and awe-inspiring at the same time. I think this may very well be the coolest place I have ever been.