If You Can’t Join Them, Beat Them

Frozen Sunset, Vatnajökull Glacier Ice Cave, Iceland
Sony a7R V
Sony 12-24 GM
1/20 second
F/5.6
ISO 100

If you’ve ever photographed the slot canyons of Northern Arizona, you have some idea of the Iceland ice cave experience. Beautiful for sure, but mixing herds of gawking tourists with tripod wielding photographers, in a confined space, is also a recipe for frustration. While I’d say that Upper and Lower Antelope Canyons (the most popular of the Arizona slots) are probably more crowded than the Iceland ice caves I’ve visited (but not by a lot), slot canyons are rarely dark enough to compel visitors to don headlamps in the middle of the day. And as most photographers would agree, the only thing more frustrating than waiting for someone to douse their headlamp so you can start your exposure, is being in the middle of an exposure when someone activates their headlamp.

With larger “rooms” connected by twisting passages that can be small enough to require squeezing through or ducking your head (sometimes both), slot canyons and ice caves have much in common. While these similar features are a big part of the appeal that draws tens of thousands of visitors each year, the similarities don’t translate to the light. In a slot canyon, sunlight pouring through one narrow overhead opening creates bouncing light and dramatic contrast. Conversely, an ice cave is evenly illuminated by translucent ceilings and walls that steep its narrow confines in soft, shadowless light.

The big attraction at the slot canyons (though in my opinion, a little overrated), is the shafts of light that spotlight the red sandstone on sunny days. The fact that these shafts are only possible midday is no secret, which means photographers have to choose between battling nearly incomprehensible crowds, or missing the main event (while enduring simply moderate crowds).

That’s different from the ice cave experience, where consistent light spreads the crowds more evenly across the day. Early in our Iceland experience, Don Smith and I learned that the best way to avoid joining the ice cave crowds is to beat them—no, (tempting as it may be) not with a tripod, with the clock. Since most of the non-photography public has an aversion to going out before the sun (even, experience has shown, when sun doesn’t appear until 10 a.m.), departing for the ice cave early enough to arrive on the front-end of Iceland’s long, gray dawn can provide up to an hour of relative peace before the large vans start unloading. Of course this strategy means sacrificing a sunrise shoot (since we’ll be in the ice cave when the sun comes up), but the trade-off is usually worth it.

We learned this year that beating the crowd doesn’t necessarily mean getting out there before them—it can also mean outlasting them. Turns out another thing tourists hate is being late for dinner. So this year (as I wrote in last week’s blog), when extreme wind threatened our planned Vestrahorn sunset shoot, Don and I flipped our usual beat-the-crowd strategy upside-down and did the ice cave at the end of the day, hopeful for quality time in the ice cave after the tourists cleared out.

As soon as we arrived, we were jolted by all the frustrations inherent in mixing tourists and photographers in a confined space—each time we were lucky enough to encounter an empty space, before the group could set up and start shooting, the next herd of bobbing headlamps would approach from one direction or the other to shuffle through our scene like a slow moving freight.

While deep shadows and brilliant walls make dynamic range the greatest photographic challenge in a slot canyon, in the darkest parts of an ice cave (deep in the glacier, or smothered beneath several feet of snow on the surface), the biggest obstacle is having enough light to compose and focus, as well as the extreme ISO and long exposures an ice cave’s darkness requires. That’s why many photographers augment their ice cave images with artificial light, which of course leaks into each nearby photographer’s frame whether they want it or not. Fortunately, most ice caves have enough bright areas to satisfy those of us who only use natural light.

Much of this year’s ice cave (the location and layout can vary from year-to-year) was large enough, and bright enough, that, while waiting for the crowds to clear, I had no problem identifying lots of natural light scenes to photograph later. In the meantime, I turned my camera and 24-105 lens toward scallops and ridges etched in the cerulean ice overhead. As I worked, groups ambled by in both directions, but after a while I noticed that all of the intruders were moving toward the exit—a very good sign. Before long, we had the entire place to ourselves, with nearly an hour of useable light remaining.

Remembering similar experiences, both in slot canyons and previous ice caves, I relished another opportunity to worship in the cathedral surroundings. By this time, most everyone in the group had dispersed to their own happy places, and I felt free to explore on my own, or with one or two others. At one point I found myself in a large chamber illuminated by a battery powered LED installed by the guides. When I asked our guide to extinguish the light, the room instantly became so dark that even 30-second exposures at 12800 ISO barely registered on my LCD.

With the clock ticking, I quickly returned to the relative brightness of the cave’s main halls and chambers, spending the rest of my time working the scenes I’d identified earlier. Time flew—when the cave started to darken and I saw fewer and fewer people from the group, I started backtracking to the exit (which had also been the entrance).

On my way back, suspecting everyone (myself included!) had memory cards brimming with beautiful images, I started congratulating our decision to forego sunset in favor of the ice cave’s calm confines—who needs a sunset anyway? But when I turned the final corner and saw sunset-gold framed by blue ice, I stopped in my tracks—all this, plus a sunset? It hardly seemed fair.

With the light fading and most of the group already outside, I had to work fast. (I wanted as much time as possible, but it’s never a good look when the leader is the person everyone is waiting for.) So I set up quickly, opting for my 12-24 lens to include as much of the sculpted blue chamber as possible. I dropped as low I could, dialed the lens all the way out to 12mm, and angled up to emphasize the icy blue ceiling over the rocky brown floor (duh).

The exposure was quite tricky, because the light outside was so much brighter than inside the cave. Once my scene was composed and focused, I adjusted my shutter speed with an eye on the histogram, pushing the highlights all the way to the right border. The LCD preview showed a bright (but not blown) sky and nearly black ice cave, but my confidence in my Sony sensor was validated when I processed the image in Lightroom/Photoshop. (As with all my images, this was a single click—no blending exposures.) On my LCD, the only thing visible inside the cave was the sunset reflection on the ceiling, a bonus I hadn’t counted on.

I only had time for a half-dozen or so frames before I heard the approaching voices of the group’s final stragglers and quickly collapsed my tripod to beat them out of cave.

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