A lifelong pursuit of excellence in photography is about vision, paying attention to details, mastering techniques, and a lot of patience and determination.

I started collecting Internet images of Iceland eight months before the trip and found where each was taken with “Google Earth.” For our dates at each location, “The Photographer’s Ephemeris” provided sunrise and sunset times, and direction of light.  At seaside locations, tide tables were essential for picking the optimum sea level, some locations were only accessible at low tide while others were only photogenic at high tide. And “Google Maps” was used for overall route planning.

From this, a 20-day schedule of winter Icelandic photography was planned and executed. From 11/5/15 to 11/22/15, we had 13 cloudy days, eight with rain, four with snow, and six with high winds.  We had three days of clear skies and three nights of auroras. On this trip, I shepherded two teams of photographers, 10 days each out of four locations; Reykjavik, Grundarfjörður, Hali, and Vik.

A link to more images is available at the end of this post.

Reynisdrangar SunsetJust west of Vik, Iceland, the black beach ReflectionsVesturhorn Reflections

The Time-Lapse video consists of 550 images taken over a 2.5 hour period. The shooting location; Jökulsárlón (Glacier) Lagoon. Taken with a Nikon D4S camera with a Nikkor 14-24mm lens @ 14mm. Final setting after testing = ISO 1000, f/2.8 @ 13 seconds + (3 second interval between exposures).  The nice thing about shooting a time-lapse is you can take any of the individual images (the raw files) and post-process them just like any other file (like the one below). 

And the morning and evening were pretty amazing too. The following images were taken with a D810 at ISO 64.

Ice Sculpture in Morning BlueMorning light on Ice Beach

Ice Sculpture in Pastals LightMorning light on selected Ice Sculptures emphasizing black sand beach environment with the curve of the shoreline.

Gale-forced SunsetImagine what it took to keep a tripod steady for this image. The wind was so strong that it was blowing the snow off the tops of mountains in front of me, taking off the tops of waves right at the shore line next to me, and blowing a storm of black volcanic sand in my face and camera, it was worth it but I'd think twice about doing it again.

Dyrhólaey Lighthouse

Click HERE to view my complete set of Iceland landscapes.