Photo-related Christmas Presents

What is everyone getting for Christmas presents this year that are photo-related?  I’m of course asking for a few lenses (started a discussion on the FB Fan page here) — what about you?

Also, I am thinking about ordering a bunch of these eStarling photo frames for my extended family.  They look cool because I can just email them photos and they show up right in their frames… same for movies and stuff.  It seems smart!  Maybe you all have heard of similar internet-enabled easy-to-use frames?

Daily Photo – The Solitary Lighthouse

Icelandic lighthouses are pretty rough places.  Well, I bet any Scandinavian lighthouse must be pretty tough…   and I bet the salty old characters that live in them are tough as nails.  You can see the high icy contrails in the extreme atmosphere… but it seemed like those same icy winds were whipping around at ground-level too.  Once again, I was reminded that I really need to get a good pair of gloves!

I don’t think living in a freezing lighthouse is for me.  Maybe if I had a slanket and high-speed internet, I could take it for a few weeks.  Speaking of slankets and snuggies and stuff…  I heard there was one you can get for air-travel and it has an inflatable neck-pillow inside if it.  I can’t imagine anything quite so pre-meditated… but actually it sounds kind of nice!

Did you know that energy is so inexpensive in Iceland that it is cheaper to ship aluminum from Australia to Iceland for its final treatment? I don’t know much about refining aluminum, but I do know that final process (bauxite scrubbing?) is quite energy-intensive. And it must be worth it to ship something all the way from the other side of the world. I can’t imagine there are many ports further apart than Australia to Iceland! I used to play this game on my Amiga called Ports of Call. I may have to boot it up to check!

Anyway, this geothermal plant was very interesting and perfect for photography. Asmundur and I spent a bit of time there moving around for cool perspectives. I’d like to thank him again for taking me there!

Whenever I drive from my home to downtown Austin, I listen to a few podcasts. One of them is the TWIP (This Week in Photography) podcast, and they recently interviewed Rebekka from Iceland. I had been lucky enough to shoot with her before when I was there, so it was nice to take a little trip down memory lane. When we had met, she was just getting into knitting, and now it’s turned into this major business for her, besides her other artistic pursuits. If you visit her Flickr page, you can see a bunch of nice photos as well as some of her sweaters. Besides those, she also made this green scarf seen below (you can see her knitting it here al fresco). She makes each one by hand and they take about a month… she’ll make you one, but be sure to offer her 4x her normal rate just to make sure you get to the top of the list!

Anyway, while I was with her, we went out to this fjord area about 100km outside of Reykjavik. There were horses milling about, so we got out to do some exploring. At first I was surprised how tame the horses were around humans and how easy it was for Rebekka, who, hitherto was known only to me as the camera whisperer.  I started going back through my photos from that trip, and I found this one to share with y’all.

One of her favorite things to do is jump in a car and go drive around Iceland to get lost. I like that so much too, that’s just what I did! Below the photo of Rebekka are a few shots from other fjords that knife into the meandering coastline and various places that kept me walking across the tundra as moody skies rolled in. She says she doesn’t take the raw beauty of Iceland for granted, and I believe her.

This is one desolate place. I was on the coast of Iceland where the sea and the wind were absolutely ripping their way past the lighthouse. I always imagine what it is like to be inside of one of those lighthouses, all night long through the winter. I can’t even envision what that would be like, and after only a short time there in the icy wind, I got the willies and was happy to get out of there.

Blues are consistently a favorite color for just about everyone. I had a wonderful conversation with the great painter Clyde Aspevig, who I had the pleasure of spending a few days with in Montana. I am so humbled and intimidated by painters! I feel like they are true artists, and I’m just a hack with tricky digital tools.

Clyde and I started talking about the color blue and people’s reactions to them. His eyes got big when I made the flippant comment, “I can’t believe how much people like blues! No matter what kind of blue I have in a photo, people always seem to say that is their favorite color of blue!” He agreed enthusiastically and sees the exact same reaction when people view his paintings.

If you look at some of Clyde’s beautiful paintings, you can see a number of things that just make sense without trying to make sense of them. He uses unconventional techniques of music, anthropology, and motion and brings them all into the canvas. His landscapes are reminiscent of the savannas of Africa, which strike us all at a deep ancestral level. His contrasted objects follow the delicate timbre of music. His skies are textured with a surreal blue motion.

Shots of lighthouses and towers demand a wide-angle lens. To me, the HDR process is secondary to lens selection in cases like these. The lighthouse already had a camber to it and this strangely-shaped doorway. The wide-angle lens accentuated this even more.

Here is one of Clyde’s paintings. You can find out more about him and his paintings at ClydeAspevig.com.

The second photo below is of me, in another part of Iceland, quite near where the North Atlantic tectonic plate pulls away from the European one. I’m proudly holding this good friend that will soon leave my world – the Nikon D2X!

This is a very old farmhouse in the south of Iceland. The wooden roof rotted off a long time ago, and now a lonely cold wind rips through the hollow doors.

This is a really nice little church by a graveyard in the south of Iceland. It was pretty much out in the middle of nowhere, as you can tell. The gate with the cross on the top leads to a tiny and lonely graveyard.

It was on the edge of night while I was driving back, and I was afraid the roads were going to freeze over… but of course that never stopped me from delaying a little bit to get a few shots here and there!

I did a precise measurement and approximately 59 seconds out of every minute was spent visualizing myself slipping and falling into the water, then washed over the waterfall forever. The other 1 second was spent partially slipping and feeling intense panic that everything visualized in the previous 59 seconds was about to come true.

When I driving randomly through the northern farmlands of Iceland, we (my camera and I) found this old church and leaning tombstones just as a storm was rolling in. I took a few shots before a zombie hand came out of the ground to grab my ankle…