Thanks to all that rain and snow there's a lot of water in Iceland.
Couple that abundant water with a craggy volcanic terrain and you've got a recipe for some dramatic waterfalls.
This is one such, the picturesque and powerful Gullfoss falls near Reykjavik towards the south of the island.
Liz and I visited these falls as part of a coach excursion from Reykjavik, arriving just as the heavens opened, drenching us in some serious rain and mist, cutting visibility markedly.
But with only a forty minute stop at Gullfoss, I was determined to get some sort of photo of these stupendous falls, bigger than any I'd seen before, certainly in terms of volume of water.
So while my wife Liz enjoyed a coffee and a mooch around the obligatory gift shop at the top of the escarpment, I ventured down to the viewing platform, complete with waterproofs for me and a shower cap for the camera, to see what sort of a view I could capture.
Conditions for decent photography, in the accepted sense, were not favourable, with spray and rain rendering the falls as a grey mush against a slightly less grey grass ledge and coating my lens with a blurry haze of water droplets as soon as I exposed my camera to the elements.
So when a short lull in the rain occured I took as many exposures as I could of different compositions, exposing to the right of my camera's histogram to give me the greatest latitude possible in post-processing, as I knew I would be having to do some heavy image manipulation in order to get anything worthwhile from these files.
Job done I scurried back up to the coach, dripping water over everyone as I found my seat next to a distinctly unimpressed Liz.
Back home after our trip, and with the files open in Lightroom in front of me, I selected this one as having the most potential for a reasonable image in terms of its composition and tonal range.
A conversion to black and white allowed me to increase the contrast severely, using a combination of clarity, curves, black and white points and the new Lightroom dehaze function, up to the point where the image had some meaning and impact.
To finish things off I then applied a duotone tint, warming the shadows and cooling the highlights, which added some more impact and interest to what would have otherwise been a grey mess.
So what you see here is definitely far removed from what I actually saw from the soggy overlook at Gullfoss, but sometimes that's not a bad thing!
Filename - iceland waterfall gullfoss 01
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 50mm
Exposure - 1.3 secs @ f22, ISO50
Location - Gullfoss Waterfall, Iceland
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom
Comments - Slow shutter speed used to blur water movement
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