We were camping a few hours north of Reykjavik, in Stykkisholmur, the ferry terminal to the Northwestern Fjords. I got up early on a misty, foggy morning to do a little exploration in the local area. The clouds were grey and heavy and there was not much hope for any light. But as I was exploring Helgafell (this hill is mentioned in the Sagas as an entrance to Valhalla) the sun broke through in the far distance and lit up these hills on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula for a few minutes.
© Jon Bertsch
Taken with a Nikon D200, Tamron 70-210mm. Processed with Photomatix Pro and Photoshop CS5.
Notre Dame was built from around 1163 to 1290 and parts of the rose windows date from that time. They are a magnificent site as you visit the ancient cathedral and it is amazing to think these have managed to survive so many years. I found a reasonably quiet area and set up for some long exposures of 2-8 seconds, but it was pretty hard to get an unrestricted view with all the visitors passing by. In the end I used a single exposure as the basis for an image and selected several different RAW exposures to use for a HDR image. Light was hitting the vaulted ceiling of the transept from the rose window and from several windows to the left and right of the image, the longish exposure helped burn some of the light into the sand coloured limestone that is used for buildings all over Paris.
Processed with Photomatix and Photoshop CS5
Iceland is home to some of the best volcanic spots in the World. Stay on the boardwalks and don’t go wandering around though – nearly every year someone ignores the signs and gets into trouble. I wanted to show the steam with the volcanic debris and ash surrounding the boardwalk (without any people) to give a sense of the sparseness and color these areas have. The stream running through the area was boiling hot as well.
© Jon Bertsch
Taken with a Nikon D200, 17-55mm @ 17mm. Processed with Photomatix Pro and Photoshop CS5.
After a fun week in Paris visiting the museums and monuments I’m catching up on my images and posting a few items here and on Flickr. Paris has so much energy and life, a different beast from the cities of California. I took this image of a cafe with the iconic Eiffel Tower in the background on our last night.
I was up at Salt Point earlier this month and managed to get a few hours of hiking and photography in. Salt Point is known for the wonderful tufoni structures that can be found around the park. I found this interesting grouping while hiking along the coast. The original raw file was processed with Silver efEX pro. Enjoy.
Tufoni – ©Jon Bertsch
Details: Nikon D200, Tokina 12-24mm.
One type of image I always like are those with motion, such as the image below of sea stacks. The waves flowing around the rocks blur into a misty background. I took this photo at the end of the day using a 3 stop neutral density filter. The filter allowed me to take a 20s exposure, so that the motion of the waves produced a soft, flowing sea around the solid sea stacks in the foreground. The image itself was taken along the Central Coast of California. The stacks are coloured by the glow from the setting sun which you can see in the background.
Sea Stacks along the Central Coast -©Jon Bertsch
Details: Nikon D200, Nikon 17-55mm @48mm, ISO 100, f.20, ~20s
Neutral density filters come in a variety of strengths. Buy one and see what different effects with waves, waterfalls and rivers you can produce – maybe you’ll find some new ways of seeing the World.
We made a quick trip up to Yosemite over the President’s day weekend. Friends gave us a chance to take their cabin reservation at Curry Village and we jumped on it. The valley had about a 3 ft of snow everywhere and was beautiful. The road on the north side of the valley was closed which meant you could enjoy a little escape from the usual roar of cars while hiking. It was a fantastic day with few hikers and lots of peace along the banks of the Merced. The valley was crawling with people since it was a holiday weekend, but all you needed to do was walk a few hundred meters to escape the throngs.
February is the month famous for the orange colours at sunset that hit El Cap and some of the other walls of the valley and multitudes of photographers where there to recapture Galen Rowell’s (and others) superb Yosemite images. I remarked to my buddies that you “couldn’t throw a tripod without hitting one…” and it certainly seemed that way at sunset as they lined up along the banks of the Merced, pointing towards the shear walls of El Cap.
In the morning I spent some time wandering the valley floor before heading off to take some images of El Cap reflected in the Merced that I hade previously staked out. When I arrived a small gaggle of photographers were already in place, 4×5 film and digital vying for position. The image below is “classic” Yosemite photo with El Cap reflected in the waters of the quiet Merced.
Details: Nikon D200, Tokina 12-24mm @15m, ISO 100, f.11
The challenge in this photo was to balance the light between the walls of El Cap and the river below. Waiting for the sun to move down the wall it was easy to see that the wall was many stops of light brighter than the river reflection. By using a graduated neutral density filter (Galen Rowell series from Singh Ray) I was able to bring the two halves of the photograph into balance. These are extremely useful filters that were originally developed for film, but even in the digital age they retain a place in my camera bag. It’s much easier to get the images correct the first time than spend hours in photoshop trying to stitch different images together. In this case I droppped the line where the neutral density filter begins right into the tree line where the heaviest shadows were destined to stay.
Yosemite is a wonderful place to visit during the Winter when snow coats the valley floor and high walls. The waterfalls are not flowing heavily, but there is plenty else to see and way fewer people than in the popular Summer months.
See you out there.
Just back from a one week trip to the Sea of Cortez on the Solmar V. We had some decent days of diving but low to bad viz for most of the trip. A tropical depression south of Baja caused the whole area to get stirred up, killing viz and creating a bouncing ocean for the first day of travel. This was our first trip on the Solmar V and we would definitely go back to do some of their other trips given the chance. Great food and the dive staff were very knowledgable. The boat is pretty sturdy and seemed to handle the seas – though a number of passengers were extremely ill.
The only downer was that apparently, due to the seasickness of some, the captain decided to sit at one site for two whole days. So I ended up doing nine dives on the same site! Not exactly what my buddy and I were expecting, but sometimes that’s what happens. To be fair this site did have a fair amount to see – decent numbers of schooling fish, a mass mating of sea stars, some mobula rays, various types of critters and scorpionfish – but we were there for the sealions, sharks and mantas (the site was “boring as sin” according to my Buddy).
A quick note on the mantas. We had been down here before in 2002 and had great dives with mantas at La Reina, the home to many mantas. However, on this trip the boat made no effort to go there which my wife and I thought strange. On returning from the trip I found some internet articles which suggested that the mantas are now a thing of the past – “mysteriously” gone – though you never know how much to trust one or two articles on the internet. I suspect they were fished out soon after we saw them if they are gone. A sad day. See this search for more.
Once we were done with La Baillena (the whale) we moved on to the sea lion colony at Los Islotes. Home to several hundred sea lions this is the place to play with them. You can spend hours here playing with the youngsters, getting charged by the bulls and enjoying the acrobatics A huge school of sardines was present when we visited, spread across the entire dive site, there must have been millions of them. You could watch the entire food chain, fishing eating, fish eating fish, right up to the sealions eating the snappers and other larger species. Beyond the sealions, there are lots of scorpionfish here, schools of tang, angelfish and smaller tuna. The tuna were fun to watch, bombing along the reef in formation, darting into the seething mass of sardine to grab a slow mover. Just fantastic. On the boat we were all comparing it to a National Geographic film.
We also dove at some other sites in the area, Swaine Rock (lots of eels, some sealions, small hard coral reef); the Fang Ming, a boat sank to make an artifical reef; La Salvatierra, a ship that sank here in 1976, which had huge numbers of fish and other sea life; Cabo Pulmo, a protected park and home to some of the largest grouper around, viz was pretty bad here so we didn’t see the beatiful reefs that it is said to contain. We were very happy to see huge grouper and lots of them at Cabo Pulmo, the twenty five fishing boats sitting at the park boundary also gives one the idea that here at least some big fish survive.
We also took one morning to look for whale sharks. They had an ultralight from La Paz join the search and we spotted one a mile or so from the boat. Everyone jumped into the pangas and off we went to join the hunt. We found a juvenile, maybe 22ft long cruising around the shallow sands of the bay and had a fun time snorkeling with him for an hour or so. The pangas would jump ahead of the shark and dump us into the water then we would try to swim alongside him for a while. It was amazing to see this huge creature in 10 ft of water, cruising along with no worries. Since the viz here was pretty bad, the shallow water was great since we had decent sunlight to view his progress. A very cool morning and wonderful to see that such majestic creatures are still able to survive.
Photography Notes
Most of the images I show here were taken with a Tokina 10-17mm lens on a D200 in an Ikelite housing. This was my first trip using this lens so there was a bit of a learning curve. I did have backscatter issues, since the lens is so wide and the water was so murky. Around Los Islotes, the sardine school basically created a wall of murk from their feeding and fish poop. On much of the open water diving the viz was 15ft.
The Solmar V has a large camera area for folks to use, though on this trip only a few people had cameras. If everyone was a photoger on a full trip, things would be crowded. I recommend bringing some bungie cords to tie down your camera when the boat is moving through big seas. Camera rigs can easily get bounced off the table. Otherwise be prepared to sleep with your baby if the water gets rough. The boat runs 120V with North American 3-prong plugs, so US visitors can charge things just as they would at home.
All in all this was a fun trip even though we were stuck at one place for a while. At least there was diving to be had. We’d definitely go back on the boat and try some of their other trips such as the Socorro islands. It’s easy to get to Cabo San Lucas from our local international airport – SFO to Cabo is a direct 21/2 hr flight.
Jon Bertsch