Photographing Iceland From the Air.

April has been jam packed with photography adventures including some beautiful hiking in the Lake District in glorious weather, being blindsided by a spring snowstorm and conquering my fear of flying by taking to the air in a 4-seater light aircraft.

In April, I took to the skies over Iceland to photograph the beautiful river deltas. Photographing Iceland’s river deltas from the air has been a long held dream of mine.

The rivers carry volcanic sediment down towards the sea and as a delta is formed it creates a painter’s palette of shapes, texture and colours as yellow, green and blue water runs over the black sand and into the sea.

As we took off, I could feel every single pitch, roll and yaw of the plane. My palms were sweaty, and I was keen to get back on the ground, but after a few minutes my nerves began to settle as the conversation flowed and I became distracted by the landscape we were flying over.

I soon realised that I had chosen the wrong seat and was struggling to compose my images. Try this exercise: take your camera, sit down and with your hips facing forward, turn and shoot 90º to your left. Easy, yes? Now try the same thing to your right. It becomes far more difficult. My back-button auto focus was difficult to access in this twisted position and I suspect this explains why I missed focus so many times, but luckily, I came away with a few sharp images and the flight was a success.

Watch the video Here To See All Image s .

Video Transcript:

If you ever been packing for a

photography trip and realized oh sugar

all of this gear is not gonna fit in on

my carry-on and the only bag that will

accommodate all of the gear that i need

is my massive shimoda action x 70 liter

it’s ridiculously big but luckily if

packed correctly i can roll and cinch it

down small enough to go unnoticed by

most airlines at least that was my hope

because i would be knackered if they

asked me to check this bag

you just want to pop your bag on the

belt and then that’s it

thank you

although i had gotten away with my

overweight carry-on my problems were far

from over you see i am a nervous flyer

on the best of days and i can just about

handle a large passenger plane

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but the thought of flying in something

like this makes me sick to my stomach

but still

i climb in and carry on regardless

driven only by the jaw-dropping beauty i

am about to photograph

okay so this is it

i’m going to the wrong side of the plane

i’m in this side

oh gosh right this is really tight can i

give you this guys how you doing

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oh so once you’re in it’s not too bad

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zero one in use

expect rnp approach runway zero one

runway zero one condition report at zero

six zero zero utc runway condition codes

six six six

drive

transition level seven five weather at

one three zero zero utc wind three zero

zero degrees one zero knots travel okay

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oh i have to admit i was incredibly

nervous when getting on this airplane

but the the pilot it’s just been so

smooth so immediately my nerves have

gone out of the window and now i’m just

incredibly excited to see what we’re

gonna have the opportunity to photograph

we should be at our first location which

is quite funny that we’re calling it a

location in about five minutes but i

mean just looking out the window it

already it looks

incredible so i’m

very very excited to see what’s going to

happen here

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bloody led i thought was going to get

sucked out of the window i tell you what

the fuse down to the ground was

something to behold

and this is an experience i will never

forget but it wasn’t easy freezing wind

motion sickness almost no room to

maneuver and an autofocus system that

didn’t want to play ball this was a far

more difficult photo shoot than i

thought it would be but look at that

view you know what i’m gonna say i don’t

even care i’m going to say it it’s

absolutely stunning

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okay so we are we are coming back up on

the river delta the most vibrant most

colorful one the one where we all get

excited i’m in the back now i’m gonna

switch with 35 millimeter prime lens

because i’m slightly worried

about the quality of the kit lens that i

was uh previously using on the fuji so

we’ll give this a go and

yeah i mean this is what else to say but

amazing aerial photography

35 millimeters right should we open the

windows

ready

yeah go

[Applause]

so we continued to do more of the same

filling our memory cards and being

hypnotized by the landscape below but

all good things must come to an end and

soon we landed in reykjavik but i had a

feeling of uncertainty as i wasn’t

entirely sure i had any sharp images or

in fact any good compositions so make

sure you stay to the end of the video

where i will show a slideshow

of all of the images from this flight

that were indeed a success at least in

my mind anyway you may disagree if so as

usual let me know in the comments so

welcome back down to earth everybody a

pokey hotel room in iceland but that

flight was incredible i have mixed

feelings about the photography like

i felt i felt very much as though it

wasn’t me creating the images i was very

much relying on autofocus and where the

pilot flew the plane if that makes any

sense at all you know but as an

experience

absolutely out of this world and we do

have

well over

well over 500 images

so i was praying and praying and

spraying and praying but i’ve put a few

of them on my ipad to check you know and

i thought it’d be interesting to look at

the processing

of some of these images because i know

when i look at this type of photography

the colors the vibrance everything is

is well it’s unbelievable it’s

incredible and i question it i’m like is

that like legit how it looked well i’m

going to show you so here on the ipad

i’ve got a raw file i particularly like

this image it is

sharp

certainly sharp enough and i suppose the

beauty of this type of photography is

it’s abstract photography so sharpness

doesn’t matter as much as form contrast

color shapes that kind of thing but this

to me this one stood out because of the

colors the golds the teals and this

lovely

division of contrast or division of

texture so i’ve got smooth one side

patterns the next so the first thing i’m

going to do is go for a crop i’m going

to try this as a 4×5

and that’s just going to give us a

lovely nice divide between the image so

always start with a crop i do anyway

because i like my aspect ratios and now

we’re just going to go in and we’re just

going to play i’m going to play with a

contrast

and make this very quick my contrast

looks great lift the whites pull back

the blacks which is going to give even

more contrast and detail

i mean already that’s improved that’s

looking fantastic i’ll have a look at

the clarity slider because i think that

is going to

bring out a lot of a lot of detail and

texture so just increasing the clarity

makes everything pop if i increase the

saturation the vibrance just a little

bit don’t want to go overboard i don’t

want it to look fake

and now i’m just going to play with the

temperatures like oh yeah there we go so

just by warming up the image a tiny bit

really really brings out the vibrance

and saturation one final thing that i

will do is add a graduated filter like

so and i’m just gonna just darken down

this left portion of the image just

because it looked a little bit tiny bit

washed out

there we go so as a very very quick go

on the ipad here like just a couple of

minutes in the hotel room

that looks pretty good obviously i’ll

finesse this when i get back home on my

big computer but i think i thought it

would be valuable to see the images from

raw to a somewhat processed image

because it does look unbelievable and

hopefully by watching this video and

seeing how it’s done

it gives you a bit more perspective when

you see these type of images because i

know they are very popular

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then

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well there you go

guys i really hope you’ve enjoyed this

video something a bit different from me

and with a bit of luck you’ll join me on

the rest of this uh adventure

in iceland as we head to the west fjords

an area that i’ve never been to before

and we’ll be shooting film so until then

thanks for watching and

yeah bye for now.