Once you’ve got over the sense of awe that these magnificent waterfalls, far in the northern wilderness of Iceland’s Arctic Circle landscape, induce in any visitor, as a photographer you’ve got to figure out a way of illustrating the thundering vastness of this natural phenomenon. The images I’d seen of this location before coming here didn’t prepare me for how huge these falls are, since they’d failed to convey any sense of the scale of them. Luckily I had my portable scale-giving device beside me, who’s happy to work for sweets and treats and I soon had her installed in various (safe) positions around the mountainside. Hopefully this gives you an idea of how high these rocky cliffs and falls are.
To get this far north in Iceland requires a bit of a drive if you’re travelling from Reykjavík. Many of the roads away from the N1 hringvegur ringroad are unpaved which, given the extraordinary cost of car hire in Iceland, means a few days of bumpy riding in a Nissan Micra entirely unsuited to the lava desert terrain and a nervous few minutes back at the rental counter when you return it as you wait for the verdict on the damage you’ve done. The locals have huge off road vehicles with balloon tyres that wouldn’t look out of place on the surface of the moon.
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After the choking chimneys, coal mines and endless streams of trucks clogging the Yellow River valley, it’s a remarkable breath of fresh air when you cross the mountains into the sweeping grasslands of northern Inner Mongolia. You get a sense that the China you’d become familiar with is ending and there’s an endless prairie of sandy grass stretching over the horizon all the way to Siberia.
The yurt with its single, surly occupant, serves as simple terminal for this remote landing strip, marked by flags that flutter endlessly in the never ending wind. I presume the ancient Russian biplane brings Chinese tourists from Beijing to experience the Mongolian grasslands and stay in the rough and ready ger (as they’re called locally) holiday camp. A sort of Mongolian Butlins where the usp is you get to see the stars at night. I bet there’s still a KTV though.
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1/200 second, f9, ISO200 24mm
10000 x 3665 pixels. Please don’t steal this image, it’s how I make my living.
Despite being chock full of picturesque scenery, I find the Lake District quite hard to get great pictures in. First, of course, is the weather. I’ve been there three times already this year and have only got great light on a couple of days. It rains. A lot. Seathwaite, just on the other side of these peaks, is the wettest place in England, and you can tell from the lush pasture that this valley sees its fair share too. It can get very hazy and on a weekend the roads are almost gridlocked with daytrippers. But when the light goes in your favour, it can be the most glorious place to be. This was one of those days.
Although a common sight throughout the British Isles (and therefore almost invisible to the indigenous population), dry stone walls seem to hold a special attraction for overseas visitors who find their simple charm and construction on impossibly steep slopes fascinating. I remember reading a quote from a postcard photographer when I was younger saying ‘dry stone walls and sheep always sell well. If I could get a shot of a sheep on a wall, I’d be rich.’ I always keep an eye out for that rock climbing sheep, but I’ve not found it yet.
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1/125 second, f13, ISO200 24mm
10000 x 3679 pixels. Please don’t steal this image, it’s how I make my living.
I haven’t worked with black and white film since the advent of affordable digital SLRs and I can’t say I miss the roller coaster lottery of developing and printing, though it was quite a satisfying craft when it worked out as you expected. I do miss the graphic boldness of a high contrast monochrome image though and some pictures – like these – are just begging for this treatment. Because my workflow involves Lightroom to process the images (a new digital craft not dissimilar to old school developing) it was easy to convert them to greyscale and adjust the tones to my liking to give this classic contre-jour feel, a timeless bold expressiveness that concentrates the viewer’s eye to the composition and lighting that colour sometimes disguises.
These images were taken on the first morning I had in Milan without rain. I wandered round soaking wet for two days scouting for locations and potential shots before the weather turned to my advantage and transformed the gloomy industrious city into the more picturesque Italian town I was looking for.
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1/125 second, f16 to f22, ISO200 20mm
2848 x 4288 pixels.
Please don’t steal these images, it’s how I make my living.
Every Wednesday I get the comic shuffle. This involves an eager seven year old dancing around my legs demanding, pleading and begging for me to buy them the latest edition of the Beano. Now to those readers outside the British Isles, this will mean nothing. My compatriots however will know exactly what I’m talking about, since there can be barely anyone who spent their childhood here, boy, girl, black, white, rich or poor who wasn’t raised reading this anarchic British institution. There are scruffy piles of them all over my house now from the bathroom to the garden and everywhere inbetween, since they are apparently sacred objects that cannot be thrown away or recycled after reading but must be stockpiled in case of an imaginary shortage of bad puns and excruciating jokes with which to torture parents.
So, you ask, what has this got to do with this picture? Well, most weeks the Beano comes with a ‘free’ gift (they put the price up when one’s sellotaped to the outside) of fantastically poor quality but whose Chinese plasticiness is irresistible to anyone under the age of 10. Fed up being menaced by the bow and arrow set on last week’s cover I decided to try to turn these toys to my advantage and set up the shot above. Not many children were harmed in the making of this picture, but large amounts of Easter egg chocolate were required as bribes.
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1/125 second, f6.3, ISO200 50mm
14440 x 3000 pixels. Please don’t steal this image, it’s how I make my living.
Getting a sense of scale of the torrents in the remote Westfjords of Iceland. Image © fotoVoyager 2009.
