Tasiilaq

East Greenland Part 4 – Aerial Glacier Photos (Podcast 542)

by Martin Bailey | Sep 26, 2016 | Podcast, Travelogue, Workshops

This is the concluding episode of a four part series to share my experiences and ten more images from my recent East Greenland photography adventure, including what I think is some pretty special aerial glacier photos.

We finished part three after looking at a few aerial photographs from a chartered helicopter, and we’d landed in front of the Heim Glacier for 20 minutes, before taking off again, to do a swoop over the back of the glacier, giving us a view from above, as we can start to see in this first image for today (below).

The Heim Glacier from the Air

As I mentioned at the end of last week’s episode, I had bumped my ISO to 800, and was shooting with between 1/1600 and 1/3200 of a second shutter speeds, to overcome the vibration of the helicopter. For this shot I was using my 24-70mm lens, at 31 mm, and was obviously attracted to the two pools of clear water in front of the glacier.

The other challenge when shooting from a helicopter is that you really have very little time to think about your composition, as the scene below you is changing all the time. I’m happy with these images, but I remember keeping every sense on high alert as I tried to decide on the next shot and capture each possible image with very little time.

Global Warming In Our Face

I got another few frames after this one as we climbed, but as I realized that we were soon going to be over the main Greenland glacier, I decided to switch to my 11-24mm lens, and boy am I glad I did. The detail from this next image might not come across in the Web version, but I believe these next few images (below) are some of the most important of my career so far.

The Greenland Main Glacial Shelf

I love the texture, and the relative simplicity of this shot, despite the detail that can be seen in each fissure when you look closely. The reason I think this is important though, is because Greenland is obviously very much in the spotlight when we talk about global warming, and unfortunately I don’t think this view is going to be there much longer.

Here is a screenshot from Google Maps (below) showing where I was over the glacier as I made the last image. This won’t mean much as it is, but note at this point how far down the fjord the glacier runs. Pretty much to the bottom, where the Johan Petersen Fjord meets the Sermilik Fjord.

Greenland Johan Petersen Fjord Glacier

As we swung around the back of the glacier though, I was even more happy to have switched to my 11-24mm lens, as it enabled me to shoot this photograph (below). This is looking down on the Heim and Kagtilerscorpia Glaciers. What I want to impress on you here though, is just how much the ice has receded.

Heim and Kagtilerscorpia Glaciers and Johan Petersen Fjords

I don’t know how old the satellite photos used by Google are for this part of the world, but I doubt they are all that old. Yet you can see that the glacier has now melted right up to the three pieces of land right next to the pin showing where I was when I made the previous photograph.

This to me is pretty shocking. I don’t know what lies further in land, beneath the main glacial shelf of Greenland, but at this rate, I don’t think we’ll have to wait many years to be able to see exactly what it looks like below there. I also hope that this kind of imagery will help people to realize that whatever the cause, global warming is real, and we are losing glaciers like this one at an alarming pace.

Berg from Above

The next photo I wanted to look at is as we flew over the Sermilik Fjord again, and I got a number of photographs of Icebergs that show their beautiful under water portions pretty well. There wasn’t time to use a polarizer filter, but as you can see from this image (below) there were some angles where there was no reflection on the surface of the water anyway, so we were afforded some beautiful views like this.

Iceberg from Above

People often quote different ratios, but according to the laws of physics based on the density of ice, it is generally thought that only one-tenth of an iceberg is above water, leaving nine-tenths that are below the water. As we see this huge body of ice drawing down into the depths, it’s not hard to imagine just how much ice there is below the surface of the water.

Tiilerilaaq from the Air

In the previous episode, I talked about our visit to the settlement of Tillerilaaq, and this had taken us an entire morning to get to in our speedboat. By helicopter, it was less than 15 minutes away from Tasiilaq. In this photo, you can clearly see the tiny channel through which we’d traveled to get from the Ammassalik Fjord route we’d taken to Tiilerilaaq, and it was really nice to get this view of the settlement from above.

Tiilerilaaq from the Air – East Greenland

Blue Lake and Mountains Near Tasiilaq

As we continued on, we passed over the mountains between the Sermilik Fjord and Tasiilaq, and got some great views of the mountains and lakes up there.

Here (right) is a lake that looks to have blue glacial meltwater as its source, almost iridescent in the sunlight shining on it between the broken cloud.

To keep my shutter speed high, I had been adjusting my aperture a lot, based on how high we were. Most of the previous images were shot at f/10 or f/11, and that gave me plenty of depth of field at the distance we were shooting from, and the wide aperture.

For this image, as we were even higher, I dropped down to f/8 at 24mm, for a 1/2000 of a second shutter speed, still at ISO 800. Everything from the nearest foreground to the distant mountains is in perfectly sharp focus.

A few minutes after this, we were over the bay at Tasiilaq, and before we knew it, landing at the heliport on the edge of town.

The helicopter is run by the brother of the owner of our hotel, and although they were a little reluctant at first to allow us to open and shoot through the windows, it all worked out really well.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I hadn’t flown in a helicopter until four years ago, when I had a whizz around Niagara Falls while I was in Canada for my 2012 Pixels 2 Pigment workshop, but since then, I’ve ridden in helicopters a few other times, over Tokyo at night, and then a total of three more times here in Greenland by the time we’d finished the tour. I think they are becoming more accessible as enterprising people build businesses around this sort of ride, and that’s a very welcome change, especially when we are allowed to open the windows etc.

After returning to the hotel, I quickly went through my photos, and was happy to see that they were all nice and sharp, and that I hadn’t wasted my money. I was also really happy with my decision to switch to the 11-24mm lens as we flew over the back of the glacier. In fact, I’m even happier that I decided to put it in my vest pocket, as I almost didn’t. Sometimes we make really bad decisions, and they sting like hell. The more we do this though, the more likely we are to make better decisions, and it’s great when they pay off like this.

Aurora Borealis

So, by this point, it was August 30, and we only had a couple more nights in Greenland. We had been keeping our eyes on the Aurora forecasts, and had a bit of a display the previous night, but with a better forecast for this night, we headed out again at about 11 pm, and were pretty happy to see some beautiful Aurora Borealis stretching across the entire sky. Here is a shot from a few minutes walk from the hotel (below).

Aurora Borealis Near Tasiilaq

For Aurora, as for most night sky photography I do, I generally set my lens to it’s widest aperture, f/4, and with an ISO of 3200, use a shutter speed of 20 seconds. If the Aurora gets brighter, I will try to reduce the shutter speed to 15 seconds, which ensures no movement in the stars, and then as it gets brighter still, I start to bring the ISO down. This shot was at my initial settings though, so f/4, 20 seconds at ISO 3200.

Unfortunately, it was really windy, so the lake nearby was not reflecting anything, and I honestly don’t think I could have scrambled down there in the dark anyway, but I’m happy enough with this shot. There were some beautiful patterns being made, and I like the touch of purple as well.

The next morning we headed out on a speedboat again, and spent a number of hours whale watching. I think we’d used up all of our luck by this point though, so although we saw a number of whales, we were not able to really get any good photos. Still, it was great to just be around them.

Afterwards, we headed over to the glacier that you can see in the distance in this next photograph (below), and then on to Kulusuk, which is the town near to the airport that we’d flown into from Reykjavik. The houses in Greenland seemed to follow pretty much the same pattern in the most part, which makes for nice photos I guess, as they are often either beautifully colored, or with the peeling paint, like the two in the foreground here.

Kulusuk

This day was a bit of a mess logistically mind. The people that we’d organized the speed boat with forgot to buy our lunch, so they gave us money to buy something at Kulusuk. This means that we had to eat in the town, and one thing that doesn’t come across in my photos is that the towns are full of little flies that try to get into your eyes and ears, and are a real pain. It would have been much nicer if we could have eaten over by the glacier before coming to town.

The next hiccup was that when we got back to our boat, our driver had caught the propeller of the boat on the rocks in the bay, and broken the propeller clean off. He was a resourceful young chap though, and quickly organized a replacement boat and driver, who we would spend the rest of the day with.

We went back out into the open water south of Tasiilaq, and tried our luck at some whale photographs again. It didn’t work out photographically, but at one point a Fin Whale surfaced right near us, and actually called out. It was a magical moment. I couldn’t find any recordings on the Web that sounded like what we heard, but it was a long droning sound that we could feel through the water as much as audibly hear it.

I used to have a record of whale calls when I was a kid, and the hair on the back of my head would stand up when I listened to it. The memory of actually hearing a call like this in real life, bobbing around in a boat off the coast of Greenland, is one that will stay with me for the rest of my life, hopefully.

On our last night in Greenland, the Aurora gave us another display, which I captured this time with a nearby satellite dish, as I liked the space relationship (below). The dish was lit up by nearby lights, so I didn’t have to do any light painting or anything.

Aurora Borealis Near Tasiilaq

Again, the purple was beautiful, and more pronounced in this image, although I prefer the shape of my shot from the previous night over this one.

The following morning, as I opened the curtains in my room, there was a beautiful mist over the town of Tasiilaq and down into the bay, so I grabbed my camera, and went outside to get a few pre-breakfast images, before the mist cleared. The town isn’t as pretty from above as it is below, so here’s a shot of the bay with the few seemingly resident icebergs (below).

Icebergs in Mist at Tasiilaq

I shot this at 135 mm with my 100-400mm lens to isolate the mountain and bergs. As the sun made its way down into the bay, the mist quickly burned off, so I was happy to have got these last few images, as we were to leave for the heliport shortly after breakfast, to fly back to Iceland for one last dinner before we disbanded, completing the tour.

Greenland Portfolio

I am just completing putting together a portfolio of this Greenland work, which you will be able to see at https://mbp.ac/greenlandportfolio probably by the time I release this podcast post, so please do take a look if you have a minute. I’m also going to try to put together a slideshow video soon too, and I’ll let you know once that’s available.

Licensing My Greenland Images

If you would like to use any of my Greenland work commercially, you can license these and many more images from the trip from my OFFSET stock library.

Future Greenland Tours?

I’m sure you’re wondering if these Greenland tours are going to be a regular thing moving forward, but the answer right now is, I don’t know. We had an amazing time, but financially, this isn’t currently a viable tour, as we only had a few participants.

I went ahead with the tour, because I wanted to visit Greenland myself, but for basically seven days in Greenland it’s an expensive deal, and I don’t think people realized just how much they would be getting for their money, including of course flights from Iceland and the local helicopter from Kulusuk to Tasiilaq and speedboat transport on most days.

The other thing is that the speedboats were pretty rough some days. The boat we had for the first two days was the most comfortable, but that broke down, and we had one without any cushions on the seats the following day, and when you are slamming down on waves on a choppy sea, it was uncomfortable, bordering on dangerous, so I’d really like to see them get a better handle on the transport situation before organizing another trip.

Having said that, Greenland is an absolutely magical place, and I will go back. It has everything if not more in some ways than Antarctica, at a fraction of the price, so I don’t see how I’ll be able to stay away.

Let Us Know if You’d Like to Go!

If you would like to go to Greenland, drop me a line. I can certainly start to build a list of people that are interested, and set something up again if enough people are interested. You can contact me with our contact form which is linked to all pages on our web site. You can also subscribe to our Tour & Workshop Newsletters and we’ll let you know if we set up a future trip.

Opening for Complete Namibia Tour 2017

Before we finish, I’d also like to let you know that we have had one cancellation from our June 2017 Complete Namibia Tour, so if you would like to join me for that, take a look at the details here: https://mbp.ac/namibia

Complete Namibia Tour 2017

Show Notes

See Martin’s Greenland Portfolio here: https://mbp.ac/greenlandportfolio

License Martin’s Greenland images here: https://mbp.ac/offset

Music by Martin Bailey

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East Greenland Part 1 – Tasiilaq, Glaciers & Icebergs (Podcast 539)

by Martin Bailey | Sep 5, 2016 | Podcast, Travelogue, Workshops

Having just completed a 7 day tour of East Greenland, today I’m going to share some of my experiences and photos in the first of a travelogue style series of episodes.

East Greenland was so much more than I expected, and in many ways much different. I hadn’t, for example, expected the landscape to be so rugged, or as colorful, as it is. I guess the sheer number and size of the glaciers should have given me a hint as to the geology of Greenland, but I didn’t expect the rock to be mostly of a greenish-brown color, and I found that quite beautiful.

We spent six nights and seven days based in the town of Tasiilaq, on the Ammassalik island. We spent some time walking around the town, but mostly traveled out of town, via the nearby fjords, photographing the icebergs, the beautiful scenery, and on a few occasions, we had wonderful encounters with humpback and fin whales.

I shot some 3,300 images, an average of around 500 per day. This is high for a predominantly landscape trip, and that was partly because we did see some wildlife, which you tend to shoot in bursts, but also because we travelled mostly by boat, so I tended to shoot more because of the rocking of the boat and I was shooting handheld. It was also simply because the place was so beautiful, it was hard not to shoot.

I kept up with my selection process, marking all of the images that I wanted to process by the end of each day, and all but two days, I was able to get the majority of my processing done too. This was the first trip that I’ve processed exclusively in Phase One’s Capture One Pro 9, having switched recently. I’ll talk more about the processing in a future episode, but I just wanted to let you know that I found the experience really easy, and I was getting great results, as I expected.

After a day in Reykjavik after Greenland, working on my images, I was able to get my initial selection of photos down to 178, from which I’ve selected the first ten to share with you today. I’ll put together a portfolio of work from the trip, and probably a slideshow with some of the video I shot later as well, but for now, we’ll work through this first selection, and I’ll continue the series in blocks of ten images for a few weeks.

Helicopter Ride from Kulusuk to Tasiilaq

We flew in to East Greenland from Reykjavik, Iceland, to land on a dirt runway in the town of Kulusuk. We’d revisit Kulusuk by boat later in the trip, but with our luggage, on this first day, we started our time in Greenland with a nine minute helicopter ride to Tasiilaq.

This first photo (below) is really a documentary shot, to show you the view from the helicopter, as we entered the bay at Tasiilaq, just to the east of the southern tip of the Ammassalik island. As you can see, the rocks of the islands form almost sheer drops into the ocean, allowing icebergs, of which 70% is below the surface, to draw very close to the shore.

Entrance to Tasiilaq Bay

Just to the right of the scene in the first image, we stayed in the only actual hotel in Tasiilaq, that is situated almost at the highest point in the town, so the first thing we did was to grab our cameras, and document the town and bay, as you can see in this photo (below). This isn’t the prettiest angle to photograph the town from, but it does give you a good idea of the place, with the colorful houses, the large red fish processing plant down by the harbor, and the town football ground, in the right foreground.

The Town of Tasiilaq – East Greenland

The hotel owner proudly told us that construction of their new roads through the town had just been completed the previous week, and the roads were very nice, especially when you consider that they were just potholed dirt tracks until recently.

Hanging Fish in Tasiilaq

There are a few cars in town, which help with getting up and down the steep hills, but the furthest you can drive is around 2km. There are no roads out of town. The only way to get in or out of town is by boat, helicopter, or on foot.

Everyone Dries Fish

On our first afternoon, we went for a walk around town, to find our bearings. I’ll probably show more images of the town in a slideshow and portfolio later, but for now, here’s a shot of a fish, hanging from the eaves of one of the homes (right).

It seems that most homes have fish hanging under the eaves or from wooden racks. Most of the time the fish are gutted and opened up, but this guy looked pretty much like he did when he was swimming in the ocean, so I thought perhaps a little more appropriate to share here.

I like the contrast between the golden-brown of the fish, and the weathered green paint of the building.

Viking Warrior Iceberg

The iceberg in the foreground of the first photo we looked at today, was still sitting in the channel just outside the bay at Tasiilaq, on the following morning, as we ventured out by boat for our first trip out on to the ocean, and then down the Ammassalik Fjord. This was so multifaceted that I still have 17 photos of this one iceberg in my final selection, from various angles and focal lengths.

Viking Warrior Iceberg

I couldn’t help thinking that the spike that we see here looks like the hat of a viking warrior, and below is half a face, with his eye socket, nose and a slight indentation for a mouth. I’d love to share more shots of this berg to show you why I ended up with so many still in my selection, but we’ll move on for now.

After heading south, out of the bay at Tasiilaq, we were greeted by a couple of pods of humpback whales, feeding. I got some nice minimalist shots of their flukes as they dived, but an encounter that I’ll share with you in a future episode trumped any and all whale encounters I’ve ever had, so we’ll save the whale shots until then too.

Afterwards, we hung a left, and headed north-east up the Ammassalik Fjord, and our first stop was definitely something that I had not expected, though pretty cool all the same. Apparently, during World War II, the US took responsibility for protecting Greenland.

Bluie East Two

Bluie East Two was a US air field and weather station, which was abandoned after the war. There are thousands of oil drums strewn across the landscape, which I didn’t photograph, but as we see here, there’s even a crane, abandoned on the beach (below).

Abandoned Crane at Bluie East Two

This is a slightly forced perspective, as I wanted to exclude a large telegraph pole sticking out of the ground to the right of the frame here. I used a new Breakthrough Photography X4 10 stop neutral density filter coupled with my old ND8, for 13 stops of neutral density, giving me a shutter speed of two minutes.

Here’s another shot (below) of the abandoned air field, and here we see the old 1940s military trucks, and the hanger in the distance, which has collapsed under the weight of the snow that falls here shortly after their short summer has ended.

Abandoned Air Base – Bluie East Two

Because these are long exposure shots, I tried them in black and white as well, but this is one of the few occasions where the color of the rust in the trucks and oil drums was too important to the shot for me to take away. To the left of this scene there are literally thousands of oil drums strewn across the land. Apparently the local Inuit people appropriated most of the ones that still had oil in them, so it didn’t go to waste, or cause any pollution, as far as I can tell.

Knud Rasmussen Glacier

After an hour photographing the abandoned air base, we continued to sail along the Ikateq channel to enter the end of the Sermiligaaq Fjord and on to the Knud Rasmussen Glacier, where we stopped for lunch, before photographing the beautiful scenery there.

This is actually the furthest north that we went during this tour, and we are at this point actually inside the Arctic Circle. A first for me! Here is a photo of the glacier and its surroundings (below), shot a little way up the hill from the fjord.

The Knud Rasmussen Glacier

Unfortunately, these glaciers in Greenland, like most glaciers worldwide, are receding at an alarming rate. The map that I used during this trip was published in 1991, and shows the face of this glacier a number of kilometers further forward compared to where it actually is now. Even the relatively frequently updated Google Maps show me past the face of the glacier at this point, and the satellite maps, which are the most recent, show me right on the edge of the glacier.

For this next photo (below) we almost were on the edge of the glacier, although it’s often deceiving just how close you are, because these things are so huge. The face of the glacier here is at a guess probably 50 meters high or more. Even what appear to by tiny blocks of ice dropping off the face of a glacier like this causes a huge noise and ensuing splash and wave.

Face of the Knud Rasmussen Glacier

I like to photograph just the face of the glacier like this, to showcase the fissures and beautiful colors, especially when there’s a nice reflection, but I also like to find an angle that shows the glacier more in it’s environment, but still powerful, and I think I’ve done that in this next image (below) with an iceberg and ice pillar just in front of it.

Ice Pillar Near Knud Rasmussen Glacier

I shot this from our little boat as we started back after a break on land, before heading back down the fjord. I’ve enhanced all of these photos to a degree in Capture One Pro 9, to bring out the texture and the color of the ice and the sky etc. I didn’t do much, but I’ll share some of those techniques in a future workflow episode in the coming weeks.

Further back down the Sermiligaaq Fjord, just before the entrance to the Ikateq channel, we stopped to photograph this iceberg (below) which I thought was particularly beautiful. Of course, we stopped to photograph many more, but in trying to keep this to ten images per episode, and because this is one of the last images that I selected from our first day out on the boat, we’ll finish with this for today.

Iceberg on the Sermiligaaq Fjord

I’m always amazed by the blue color in some icebergs. It never gets old. This trip in many ways was as good, if not in some ways better than going to Antarctica. I love Antarctica, and I’ll definitely go back at some point, but it’s a long way down there and much more expensive. When you consider how much easier it is to get to Greenland, I think it’s going to become a very popular spot in the coming years.

Then, all of the ice will melt and there’ll be nothing left to see, but that goes for Antarctica as well, if we, and that’s a collective “we” meaning the human race, don’t change our selfish ways.

OK, so we’ll wrap it up there for this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed joining me on the first couple of days of my recent tour to East Greenland. I’ll be back next week, with part two of this series, so I hope you will join me again as I continue my adventure!