Category: opinion

I have just added a new gallery of images to the Galleries menu. All of the images were taken at Jökulsárlón, the glacial lagoon, in the south of Iceland.

The lagoon sits between the head of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier and the sea. Chunks of ice collect in the lagoon and eventually make their way out to the sea, where wind and tide can wash them back on to the black sand and ash beach.

A lot of people take lovely images  of the ice lagoon with bright sunshine and clear blue skies. I however, have only seen rain, heavy overcast and drifting ash from the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. This did make for some dramatic images.

This set of images may become my next exhibition.

On Facebook (a social media site) there is an on-going challenge. This involves being nominated to post five (one each day) black and white images and then nominate someone else.

I don’t usually involve myself in such things as I don’t like my photography being restricted by artificial constraints or by some proscribed ‘have to’ deal.

However, this time the request came from a highly respected photographer, Ragnar Steffanson. These are the images I chose. I didn’t nominate any other photographers because I didn’t know any that hadn’t already taken part.

When my son was 8 years old, we were looking through the For Sale ads in a car magazine. He spotted an ad for a black 1967 Mustang fastback. He said “That looks fantastic, we should buy it”.

We did.

For Father’s Day this year, my son, now 30, and I took it for a drive. I even let him drive it.

In a previous post I mentioned that I am auditioning an Olympus E-M5 micro four thirds mirrorless camera for a more important part in my photography. This has been based on weight as much as anything else. But the more I use the little E-M5 the more it impresses me.

One type of photography I like to do is long exposure, using neutral density filters to create movement over time, such as a waterfall or river.

I wasn’t sure if the E-M5 would be up to this, but I discovered a feature called live update. As the shutter is held open in manual bulb mode, the LCD screen on the rear of the 5 updates the image at user selectable intervals. You just watch your image develop.

I tried it out down at the remains of the old pier at Clifton Springs, near Geelong. It was an overcast, rainy day but I managed to get a break in the rain to try some images. Neither the camera nor I was bothered much by the rain, but rain drops on the ND filter show up nicely.

The only major drawback I have is trying to manually focus with the electronic viewfinder (EVF), neither my eyes nor its resolution are quite up to accurate focusing all the time.