Iceland From The Air

Iceland is beautiful from any viewpoint.

The only trouble is that everybody agrees that Iceland is beautiful. So nearly all of the most accessible locations are clogged with tourists during the day. Fortunately for Landscape Photographers, we prefer to avoid broad daylight and end up at these scenic spots at ridiculous hours. But I have noticed that the tour buses are arriving earlier and staying later. So in my experience (only two visits) it cannot be assumed that just because you show up at o dark thirty, no giant bus will disgorge a herd of well-insulated people to stand in the middle of your epic composition taking endless selfies.

This is a viewpoint behind a restaurant. Not visible was the mob around me and just to the right.

So when Muench offered a drone-focused workshop in Iceland, I was eager to sign up. Fly over the parking lot and away from the mob. No selfie-takers to clone out in Photoshop. I was thinking of the conventional Iceland attractions though. Skogafoss. Vik. The easily-reached spots everyone knows about. Fly over the tour buses to get the shot, erase the odd influencers who escape the viewpoint corral in post.

But what I got was gloriously different. We did visit one glacier on the tourist itinerary. Last time I was ther it was a tour bus convention. This time, we were there before Tourist Breakfast so the parking lot was amazingly sparse. But I was not limited to shooting from terra firma this time. I flew high and far and got the shots I wish I had taken the first time. More on those later once I get the images processed.

We were mostly in the Highlands, far from the tourist friendly locations. Vast volcanic plains. Moss-covered cinder cones. Black sand. Scenes which from the ground were nondescript and kind of monotonous. From a few meters into the air, though, they were transformed.

Every road in Iceland feels remote. In the highlands it was even more so. We would drive for hours on a paved two lane road, then take an obscure side road that pointed towards some low hills. The obscure side roads got even more obscure and less road like as we traveled deeper into the boonies. It got very bumpy in spots. A few times a jolt launched the box of snacks into the air. The bananas did not fare well. The van was towing a trailer with all our suitcases. That trailer was shaken as by a pint mixer on some of these roads. I was worried about my computer and spare drone in the suitcase paint mixer. But fortunately that stuff survived.

Obscure highland road. Typical. Some were way worse.

After some minutes bouncing through the lava fields, we would stop. Here Is The Spot. Send your drones Up. Watch your battery levels. Mind the wind. Fly before the rain arrives.

From the air, the bleak landscape was transformed. Suddenly there were craters with brilliant blue lakes. Braided rivers sinuously winding to the horizon. Yellows, whites, greens, reds. The scale opened up tremendously. The brooding sky was perfect.

There was plenty of opportunity for grand landscapes. But at the same time, you could point the camera down and capture insane abstract patterns.

I am plowing through the images. I shot a lot of frames— All bracketed. A lot of them are meh but surprisingly often it’s a keeper. I will post them as I work through the catalog.

During the trip preparation zoom meeting, they told us to bring a normal camera in case we stumbled on some scenic spot or the weather closed in and we couldn’t fly. The others brought Sony/Canon/Nikon and an assortment of zoom lenses. One lady also brought an IR converted camera. More on that later. I brought the Leica Q3 Monochrom. 28mm fixed lens, no Bayer Filter, it cannot see color. I actually captured a lot of landscape shots with that camera, a bit to my surprise. It turned out the Q3M loved the dark, moody landscapes. I captured far more land shots than the others. All in monochrome.

Anyway. I am working through the images. Stay tuned.

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