Good Light Hunting

Fine Art and Travel Photography Blog

Manhattan Sunset

This is an older photo which I took late one afternoon in February 2009 on a business trip to New York City. I was staying at the Seaport Hotel, near Brooklyn Bridge, and saw this beautiful sunset as I walked back to it from the office in downtown. The shot was taken from under Brooklyn Bridge and the seagull flew past just at the right time. Created from a single raw file on my old Canon 5D Mk1 and processed with Topaz plugins.

Prints available here.

by Ian Good

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Road Trip | Iceland

Road Trip, Iceland

This shot was taken through the windscreen of a moving car on route 56 in the Snaefellnes peninsular of Iceland. No, I wasn’t driving! 🙂

Shooting through the windscreen of a moving car is not the best way to get a sharp photo, but here are a few tips to help if you do it. A fast shutter speed is obviously useful to avoid camera shake and that naturally goes with a wide aperture. A wide aperture also helps here because the smaller depth of field, combined with focusing on a point in the distance, means that the windscreen itself will not show in the photo. Settings for this shot were ISO 400, 1/2000 second @ f/4 with a 24-105mm lens at the longest setting.

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by Ian Good

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Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, Iceland

Harpa in Reykjavik, Iceland

Harpa is the concert hall and conference centre near the port in Reykjavik, Iceland. The very cool design was done by the Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects in collaboration with the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. It was opened in 2011 and is home the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra and the Icelandic Opera, as well as hosting international conferences.

The shot is a long exposure of about 3½ minutes using 16 stops of my Formatt Hitech ProStop IRND filters. Processing was done in LR5 and CS6, with the black and white conversion in Topaz BW Effects 2.

Prints available here.

by Ian Good

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Strokkur Geyser | Iceland

Strokkur Geyser, Iceland

Strokkur is a fountain geyser at the geothermal area of Haukadalur in Iceland. It is close to the larger and better known Geysir which didn’t erupt at all while we were there. Stokkur was erupting every three or four minutes. The ghosted people in this long exposure shot give an idea of the height the erupting fountain of hot water and steam reaches.

To capture the movement in the clouds, this is a long exposure of 8 minutes with 16 stops of my Formatt Hitech ProStop IRND filters, which I was using for the first time on this trip to Iceland and absolutely love! When the geyser erupts, it doesn’t last long and doesn’t show up on an exposure of this length. The fountain itself is therefore blended in from a second exposure of ½ a second. Processing was done in Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CS6. I finished the image in Alien Skin’s Exposure 6, to give it a Kodachrome 64 film look.

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by Ian Good

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Hallgrímskirkja | Reykjavik

Reykjavik Church – Hallgrímskirkja

This church in Reykjavik is a quite stunning landmark, which dominates the city skyline from miles around. It is named Hallgrímskirkja (Church of Hallgrímur), after the poet and clergyman Hallgrímur Pétursson, and was designed by the architect Guðjón Samúelsson, apparently to look like the lava flows of Iceland’s landscape. At 73 metres tall, it is the largest church in Iceland and one of the tallest buildings. The design was commissioned in 1937 and the church took 38 years to build, being completed in 1986.

We arrived in Iceland quite early in the morning, too early to check into the hotel, so headed straight to Reykjavik and this was our first photo stop. With bright sun right behind the church, the conditions were not ideal for long exposure photography. I chose a wide angle view from close in front to hide the sun behind the building and was pleased with the effect created by the long exposure and the back lit clouds.

Prints available here.