FRAMES Photography Podcast
FRAMES Photography Podcast
Jeroen Van Nieuwenhove
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In today's episode, W. Scott Olsen speaks with Jeroen Van Nieuwenhove, an award-winning Belgian-Icelandic photographer based in Reykjavík, known for his dramatic landscape, wildlife, aerial, and especially volcanic photography from Iceland and other remote regions.
You can visit Jeroen's website here.
One of the struggles that I've had when when doing uh night photography at the eruption, um that everything is moving so fast, especially if you then try to combine that with, for example, the northern lights, that becomes really, really challenging. Uh but yeah, it's not it's not something that I find is you know it's not as simple as you rock up with your camera and you're gonna take some amazing amazing photos. You'll photograph something amazing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you've taken an amazing photograph, if that makes sense. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01This photography podcast is brought to you by Frames, a quarterly printed photography magazine. Here is today's host, W. Scott Olson, with another fascinating conversation.
SPEAKER_02Well, hello everyone, and welcome to another podcast from Frames Magazine. My name is Scott Olson, and today, folks, we are talking to someone who takes some of the coolest photographs on the planet. And and yeah, actually, that's wrong. This guy, he takes some of the hottest photographs on the planet. And then before I tell you who we're talking to, I want to lay an idea out there. Every one of us that takes pictures, doesn't matter what genre, and it could be product photography, it could be portraits, it could be travel or nature, doesn't matter. Um, we are all in a search for freshness, for some kind of presence to our work that goes beyond the cliche, that goes beyond the stereotype. Sometimes that leads us into new lenses, new gear, new approaches, you know, that kind of stuff. Uh, sometimes it leads us into new locations, to new experiences. I think one of the reasons why, you know, we photographers travel so much is that we are looking for a way to interpret the world that is consistently and energetically present to us as a photographer. And then we try to find a way to translate that through our lens and camera into an image that will speak to somebody else. Now, there are photographers all over the American prairie chasing thunderstorms and supercells. There are photographers, you know, tootling about on the bottom of the ocean or in outer space. And, but, you know, it's not just adventure. It can be just about any kind of photography where you say, I'm gonna bring a voice, I'm gonna bring a spirit and a psychology to my work that is gonna make it my image, my style, my interpretation. Um, and there's really nobody out there, I think, that that is following this idea with more energy and more vibrancy than who we're talking to today. Uh, today we're talking to Yeroen van Niu Van Hova, and who is a Belgian-born uh photographer living in Iceland. And yes, I mean, we got to admit it, Iceland is one of those bucket lists things for all of us. Something about the landscape there simply says to our heart and soul, come here. There is something special in the light, in the landscape, and the way that uh it presents itself. But you know, there's a downside to Iceland as well, because like so many spots that call to photographers, you can go there and you can wind up standing into a line in a line with people who've got better gear and less insight than you do. And then suddenly you're thinking, how do I find that freshness again? Now, Yaron, I mean, when we start talking about his work, you're gonna dig this. But here is a man who is got all sorts of awards. He's a landscape photographer, a wildlife photographer, a drone photographer. Um, and I was doing a little bit of research and I was going through his resume, and okay, okay, you know, judge in the 2026 Belgian Photo Awards, judge in the Swedish Championships. Um, he's shortlisted in the uh International Aerial Photographer of the Year. He's, you know, he's got citations uh see in the nature category, the mammal category, the landscape category, all of this from the Federation of European Photographers. Um he's been, you know, Federation of European Photographers, you know, he was a finalist in the what, six of his photographs were finalists there. He's a judge for the Young Photographer Award. I'm just going through the list and I'm thinking, this guy's got all sorts of awards. And then I realized, oh hell, this is only for 26. Um, and then there's like 18 more categories where this man's work has been lauded and absolutely appreciated by audiences all over the world. He's the guy that's done 12 volcanic eruptions. This is the guy who's who's leading workshops out into some of the most wild and invigorating landscapes on the planet. And I am really looking forward to the conversation today. Jaron, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me. I'm doing great. How about you?
SPEAKER_02I am doing wonderful. So there is an awful lot that I want to unpack today with your work and how you came to be uh who you are. But let's let's start with the origin stories. Okay, born in Belgium, you're living in Iceland now. Um, you traveled with your parents a good bit when you were young, places, you know, South Africa, Canada, Norway and stuff. But when you were 10, you're rummaging around in the attic and you find an old analog canon camera. Um, okay, why did that moment be the first of many kind of calls to photography?
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm I'm not sure if it was like exactly the first because before that I was using like little point-and-shoots. I think I had to- Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think uh I have like uh the first analog camera that I used as a kid was one of those APS cameras, uh, you know, with uh elliptical uh you know rolls film uh that could do panorama uh you know all kinds of all kinds of aspect ratios and for formats. And I think that that when I when I found that canon, I think that sort of got me a little bit more interested in the technical side of things and how yeah, how photography really works and how I could try and see things uh through that camera. And especially, you know, like having such a substantial piece of gear in your hands, uh that felt like something more significant than uh than one of these little point and shoots. Uh so yeah, I think that sort of ignited a spark.
SPEAKER_02I I'm waiting for somebody to admit that their first camera was one of those little Nickelodeon or Disney cameras. Uh you know, I'll all painted up with characters. But but I mean, come on, man, you're you're 10 years old. What what was it the gadget that was speaking to you? Was it the images that you were producing? What what was calling to was it just the act of you know going outside and pressing a button?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think uh well yeah, I think what really got to me is just, you know, I don't know. I've I don't know if you've ever held one of those uh AV1s, AE1 uh canon cameras. They just felt like it felt really solid, like something really expensive, like something that you needed to treat with care. And I think that kind of got me very interested in it, in like, oh, okay, I can, you know, this feels like something really professional. So probably I could do something uh really neat with it. And very quickly, uh after one of the first trips that I used it on, I I kind of got the the feeling of like, well, yeah, this is, you know, like I like the results I get from it. And I like um yeah, I like to look back on all these memories uh from these trips, but in a in a yeah, in a nice way, in a in a way that makes me also proud to look at those images.
SPEAKER_02Were they any good when you were 10 years old, or were they just snapshots of, you know, here's the hotel room?
SPEAKER_00No, they I I have to say I'm quite proud of it. Uh my dad, he he scanned uh he scanned all the negatives of uh all those uh roles of film that I used. Um he bought one of those big machines to to do that. And I still have a lot of those images. And I have to say I'm quite proud of it, of what I was able to do as a 10-year-old. And yeah, so I think that sort of got me got me thinking maybe that's something that I can do something more with at some point.
SPEAKER_02Like I said, you traveled with your parents. Did you did you have the travel bug yourself then? I mean, were we did you look forward to these trips, or were you being dragged along by mom and dad?
SPEAKER_00Well, I uh enjoyed being on the trip. The thing I remember uh very much, and uh that's something that I quite like now, is uh I I dis disliked driving a lot. So on a lot of these trips, you go to Norway, you spend a lot of time in the car, go to South Africa, you spend a lot of time in the car. Uh I remember not liking that, but I did like seeing all the animals, uh especially whales. I've had a huge fascination uh with whales uh for my entire life, I think. And uh that started on one of those trips. So I have very fond memories of them, even though I was probably sort of strung along on uh on these trips.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so you're tootling along, you're you're having the childhood you're having, but at some point you say there was a music video, and I'm gonna botch the pronunciation here, but Haima, Hima? Hema HEMA that I mean, come on, that said this this is where you're going for the rest of your life, young man. Um, you know, it it's something so tell me that story. Tell me about the video and tell me what it caused in your head.
SPEAKER_00So the the video is it's like a music DVD by uh Siguros, which is probably more famous outside of Iceland than inside Iceland, or has more popularity.
SPEAKER_02That's always the case, yeah.
SPEAKER_00More popularity outside of it. And um I don't know, there was something about seeing all those landscapes that got me really interested in in Iceland. And it wasn't it wasn't like you know, I saw that video and then I thought this is where I want to spend the rest of my life. Uh, but it got me curious enough to want to go and visit Iceland in the fairly short term. And then in 2012 I finally uh went there, and that trip left such a big impact on me that um it was yeah, it was almost difficult to settle back in normal life after being on that trip, and that's something uh yeah, I still today struggle with putting into words like why that exactly struck a chord. This was with a scout troop, right? Yeah, yeah. So I was uh part of the leadership in our scouts movement, and with the eldest group of kids, we always um go on like an international kind of trip before they become part of the leadership. And that year we were only, I think we were only four or five uh kids, and then uh me and then another uh one of our leaders uh who was kind of guiding uh guiding uh this group of kids before they uh became part of the leadership. And we very quickly kind of found out that well, we're gonna be collecting a lot of money, doing all sorts of things like washing cars, helping people with their groceries, all sorts of things. And we very quickly figured out that because we were such a small group, we had a large amount of money that we could spend on something unique, something that a lot of other people had never been able to do. Uh so we kind of went to a travel fair uh to get ideas of where we should go and what we should be doing. And then after our travel fair, we basically came down to two two destinations. One was gonna be uh the Baltic states, uh Estonia, Latvia, uh these kind of countries, and the other uh the other was gonna be Iceland. And the way we were gonna decide this was by uh me creating a presentation about Iceland, and then my colleague, he was gonna pres uh make a presentation about the Baltic states, and then we were literally gonna let the kids decide. Uh that's how it happened. Uh, and it's safe to say, you know, uh uh we're kind of giving it away already with me having been here 10 years now. Uh but it's safe to say that Iceland won with a landslide.
SPEAKER_02Okay, now but if if you go with a bunch of scouts, you have a pretty prescribed itinerary, right? You couldn't just go exploring. So I would imagine you did the usual waterfalls, the blue lagoon, you know, that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00Well, we did some of that, but we did that at the end of a trip. Uh the one thing that we really wanted to do, um, and it had to be like it was a scouts trip. We couldn't just be tourists, right? Right. Uh so the first thing we did was um after having stayed in Reykjavik for uh one day, we traveled with a bus to the middle of the highlands, and then we did a four-day hike through the highlands uh with all our stuff, tents, sleeping bags. Uh, we were camping the entire way. Those four days that left a huge impact on me, uh, left a really huge impression on me. And that's an area of Iceland uh I go to every year still. Uh it's a place that I feel like even though I've been there so many times, I feel like I'm still discovering it. Like there's so much more to shoot, and there's so much more to do. Uh, but that place is just so otherworldly uh the landscape that this l left me thinking about, you know, what I'm doing now in my life, is that what I want to keep doing, or do I want to do more of this? Am I gonna be for the rest of my life? Am I gonna drive to Brussels for one hour and work there a whole day and then drive back home for an hour? And is that gonna be my my routine kind of thing? And it really got me thinking. And especially after I came back from that trip, I felt out of place. I felt like I was homesick for a country that was not my home.
SPEAKER_02Now, were you taking pictures during the scout trip?
SPEAKER_00Uh I was, yes. That's when I uh started, you know, for that trip, I decided to start up my photography again, but digitally, so I bought a a really cheap uh Canon 550D, this was uh cheap crop sensor uh camera. And uh that's where things kind of from that moment kind of everything spiraled out of control with my photography. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Spiraling upward though, which is a good thing versus spiraling down and down the drain. So, okay, you you take you know about a dozen trips, you say, and then finally you say, you know, okay, life, this is it. And and you did the thing, the the romantic act that all of us dream of. You sold everything, you said, I'm I'm taking my life to a completely different place.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, what what finally made you decide enough is enough, I'm not visiting, I'm moving.
SPEAKER_00I think it was a conversation I had with a friend uh at a bar where uh we were talking, we were talking about, you know, this is this is very Belgian. It's a it's uh bar culture in Belgium is very, very big. And I think, you know, one evening we were sitting there, and then I think the conversation was about, oh, so what are you doing next week? And I said, Oh, next week I'm going back to Iceland, and then we started talking about, you know, if you're gonna spend all of your holidays, uh, you know, your holidays away from work, your time away from work, if you're gonna spend that traveling, then why are you still here? Why aren't you just living there? And then you can every weekend could be a holiday, sort of. And that really got me thinking, like, yeah, why am I doing this? Why am I staying here, working, and then spending all my money over there? Um, and that really got me thinking. And I think then some months later, at some point, I decided, well, I'm just gonna do it. And I think that moment, that decision of saying I'm gonna leave everything behind and I'm just gonna move, that was probably the most difficult decision I've ever had to make. And at the same time, it made everything super easy because once I decided that I was gonna do this, then everything became really practical in my mind. It became like, okay, how can I get rid of all my stuff? What am I gonna move? What am I gonna sell? Uh, how can I find a job there? How can I uh find an apartment to stay? How can I register for a social security number? All kinds of things like that. And then I just kind of took it one step at a time, and uh, probably less than a year later I was uh in Iceland with all my bags.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02I can see you stepping off the airplane. You know, this is a movie scene now. Yeah, you got your suitcase in each hand. It's like, well, I'm here, everybody. Um, but yeah, I mean you did you went from an IT job in Belgium to an IG IT job uh in uh Iceland relatively easily.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, correct.
SPEAKER_02And so so then you're running around taking pictures, which is absolutely magnificent. Um but a problem comes along, the problem that all of us had, and that's COVID. Um so I mean you were guiding for a travel agency at the time. Give me that world of when COVID started and who you were as a photographer.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think, you know, the the thing that I thought in the beginning when I moved was like, okay, working as a photographer, that's gonna be pretty easy in a country like Iceland. And very quickly, you know, I I I thought I thought I had it figured out, right? I uh went and worked for a travel agency as an IT administrator, and I went specifically to a travel agency because I wanted, you know, I wanted that to be sort of a stepping stone where I could get some experience in the travel business and start doing things with my photography, would give me access to uh four by four vehicles. So there were a lot of benefits to to working in that job. And this was at the time that social media became much a much bigger thing. And I very quickly found out that social media, uh, even though you take pretty photos, it doesn't, you know, it's not easy. It's not it's it's a game you play and you need a bit of luck with it. And luck was not on my side. I was doing everything I could to make my social media take off, and it was just not happening. And then right before COVID, um I managed to start uh guiding for uh a travel agency, and then I thought, well, this is how it's gonna start, right? Now I'm gonna get some get some fame, uh, now I'm gonna be able to show off more of my photography to people and get a bigger audience. And then, like you said, then COVID happened, and then that whole idea came came crashing down very quickly, and that kind of put me in a position where um I was really demotivated. Like for me, it was all about this rat race uh of photography in the sense that I wanted this to really work for me, and it wasn't. And it felt at the time that everything was sort of working against me in that regard, and I think uh 2020 um that was the year I took the least amount of photos. Like, if I look in my my Lightroom catalogue, that's the year I have like four or five uh uh little albums of uh photos, and in a sense, that year should have been my best year because uh nobody was allowed to enter Iceland. I was living here, uh the country was essentially empty. You would go to all the popular sites on the south coast, and there would not be another another soul uh inside because most Icelanders were not really traveling much uh at that time either. And that was really, you know, to me that was really strange. Like I felt really drained because of this rat race, basically.
SPEAKER_02What now why wasn't the Instagram taking off? Was it just, I mean, pictures that we had seen from other people before? Was it a lack of a definitive style?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think probably um in in hindsight, uh, there's a lot of things that I was doing that was probably not really smart. Um, like um I was posting a lot of, you know, I was I was doing a lot of things that I'm now super against. So I was going to uh Kirkvetl, for example, a really famous mountain, and I went there and I took a really classic shot that everybody has. And even at the time in 2020, that also everybody had by that time. So I wasn't posted to- You gotta take it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you you gotta take it. You still have to take it, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you have to take it when you're there. But what I quickly or what I figured out now is that the best way to do this is to look at it through your own eyes and don't limit yourself to that classic view. And that's exactly what I was doing at the time. Um, and I think, you know, even today, if you open up Instagram and you type in the word Kirkfett, then uh you will see you will see this mountain shot from the same angle, probably with the same camera in a similar light setting, um, hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of times. And if you look at that and you realize that, you realize you're not standing out at all. And I think that's one of the biggest things that I was that that I was not tackling the right way. Once I started understanding that, things really started changing for me. Once I started showing that I was looking through my camera with my own vision, um, and then things quickly, quickly changed. You know, there were some other things that uh helped along the way, but that was definitely a big part of it.
SPEAKER_02I keep going back to an idea from music. You don't learn to improv until you've played scales for years. I think, you know, when we're out in the field, especially, we need to take those cliche photographs and and so we can get them under our belt and then move past them. You can't start you know with improv in in anything. But so, okay. Um COVID hits and and you know the world is crashing down. As I now tell me if I got this story right because I I may have dates mixed up. Um one morning, you're in the kitchen, you're you know, having breakfast with your daughter, you look out the window. And the sky has transformed. This was, you know, the sign from the heavens. Grab your camera, get your butt outside. Tell me what happened. Tell me what you saw and what that meant in terms of getting you out of this kind of malaise or depression about your work.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this was at uh at the end of 2020. Uh so still in the middle of COVID. Basically, I was uh my daughter, not even a year old at the time, uh just about half a year old. Um we like I was giving her food, and then um I started seeing how the sky was changing, and I I very quickly recognized what was going on because it was something that I had been dreaming about for for a very long time of seeing, and that's polar stratospheric clouds. And I don't know uh if people listening know what that is, but it's basically uh clouds in the stratosphere, and in the stratosphere there's not supposed to be any clouds, they form very rarely. And what happens is that the sun that is still below the horizon lights up those clouds in the stratosphere, and because of all the ice crystals um inside of them, um you get these weird oil-like stains, you know, like when oil is floating on water, you get like a like a rainbowy kind of smooth surface, and that's what the sky looked like. And these weren't just regular polar stratospheric clouds, they were just all over the sky uh to an extent that even in the 10 years that I've been living here, I've not seen that uh again. I've seen I've seen them a little bit, but not like what we saw in 2020. And that was really, you know, to me, that was like I need to I need to capture this. This is just unbelievable. And I I uh yeah, I went uh I went grabbed my camera, ran outside, um, didn't even think about what I was doing.
SPEAKER_02You left you left the kid in the high chair.
SPEAKER_00I woke up my girlfriend, definitely. Um but yeah, I I didn't even think about what was what I was uh what I was wearing. I just kind of went out in sneakers, sweatpants, and then uh just with um yeah, I didn't even wear a hat or gloves. I didn't think about the fact that it was minus 15 outside with heavy weight. And I just ran outside and I started shooting. And one of the things that really uh got me was um there were these ravens that were flying around the neighborhood. Um I very quickly decided, okay, these are gonna be part, if I can somehow frame them, uh these are gonna be part of uh some of the images that I do so you have like a sense of the scale of what is happening there. And these are still some of my favorite images. They're just you know what was so crazy about it to me was that I was in the middle of a neighborhood that's full of apartment buildings, and when you look at these photos, you wouldn't you wouldn't know that I was standing in the middle of an uh like in the middle of a of a city. And yeah, I was just so happy to have seen that. It almost made me like it. It was the first time in a long time that I was again excited about photography. And I think that sort of sparked, yeah, sparked my enthusiasm again.
SPEAKER_02Oh, cool. Now, I mean this is the first of three things that happened at the end of this year. Um, shortly after the sky explodes with clouds, it explodes with the aurora for you. Now, the aurora in Iceland are not that unusual. So, you why why was this event special for you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean you have um, you know, the normal lights, they come in all kinds of shapes and forms and intensities. And you know, very very often when I when I take people out to go and look at the aurora, most of the time it'll be something like a three out of ten, where you see a bright green band, and if you're lucky, then it's moving a little bit on the horizon. Most people think that the aurora is a scam because that's all they've seen. And that's just the most common, common, common variety of it. Uh but sometimes, every now and then when you're living here, then you are you tend to be more lucky to see see something like that. But sometimes the intensity becomes so crazy that you have bands of green everywhere in the sky. Even today, like just uh even today, this year, uh in January, for example, we had incredible northern lights that were just visible from from our apartment balcony. And I still go outside to look at it because even uh even after having seen that for so many times, uh it's still something that just amazes me. And that was one of those moments where it was super intense, it was super super vibrant, uh dancing a lot, and that really, you know, that's something that gets you excited about things again. Um that's that's sort of that's sort of how I interpreted it.
SPEAKER_02Yep. I mean where I live here in in the upper Midwest of the US, um, we get the northern lights fairly often as well. But they they are radically different to the eye than they are to the camera. And so we I'm gonna take a little bit of a detour here. Um how how much post-processing did you have to do for the clouds or for the aurora to say I have an image now, not an experience, but an image that I'm proud to show the world?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, not a lot. Uh and that's kind of what I do in my photography is I don't do a lot of editing uh because the whole cornerstone of my photography is that I want to inspire people to go and seek out those moments. I want them to see something that I saw. And of course, when you do a longer exposure of the Northern Lights, then it can uh it can be more vibrant, but I try to uh photograph in such a way that it's as close to reality as possible. And the Northern lights, I almost only photograph when I can keep a um a shutter speed of around one to two seconds maximum. So for me it's really it's really important to only capture capture moments that were actually clearly visible with my eyes, and most of my Aurora shots are exactly like that.
SPEAKER_02Okay, I'm jealous. In my world, it's long exposure and a deep love for the de Haze Slider. Um but um so okay, you got the clouds, you're getting excited, you got the Aurora, you you've got you know, getting even more excited. What else could happen to this planet that would cause you to even finally say, I'm back, here I am?
SPEAKER_00Well, probably an eruption. A volcanic eruption.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, a volcano. A volcano. Okay, tell me what happened.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I think it was just two, maybe like a month or two months after after it's normalized the um the first eruption in a while uh at that time. I think uh the last eruption before that was in 2015. Yeah, so about six, seven years uh after that eruption. Uh finally a new eruption starts, and it wasn't just any eruption, it was a very small, uh ever-changing eruption, an eruption that lasted six months, uh, and that was just constantly evolving and and dramatically changing. And that really, yeah, that changed changed my transformed my photography in a way that I could have never felt imaginable. And uh a lot that happened during this eruption transformed my view on photography and transformed, probably more specifically, transformed my view on social media uh in relation to uh photography, and that's sort of where that journey for me really yeah changed gears. Okay, well as it were.
SPEAKER_02Let's unpack both sides of that then. How do how did it transform the your process as a photographer? How did it transform your photography? And we'll get to social media then after that.
SPEAKER_00Well, it sort of goes uh it sort of goes hand in hand. But I think one of the things that was really special to me about seeing an eruption for the first time, something that I've dreamt about for a very long time, I think the the thing that really transformed my thinking was that you're looking at a landscape, and a traditional landscape photographer will look at the landscape and realize that we come back tomorrow, the landscape will still be there. It will still look the same, largely the same, but the conditions would have changed. And one of the things that I very quickly uh star realized I needed to better understand was how the lava was not the same, and how the landscape was building in front of me, and how that was moving and transforming. And that sort of forced me to think on my feet and do a very different kind of landscape photography than than what I was used to up to that point. And I like to call it fast landscapes in the sense that it's something that it's a landscape that's constantly moving and constantly evolving, and the compositions are constantly changing, presenting themselves and then disappearing again. That's something that really made me think very differently about landscape photography. Uh it started to make me think a little bit about landscape photography more in the sense of wildlife photography, if that makes sense. Like you have to choose, shoot faster, you have to respond faster to what's happening in front of you. It sort of changed my view on how to do this. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, you I mean, you can take five, not in the digital age, I mean you can simply stay there for hours, take 5,000 photographs, you know, so that you've captured everything. How do you decide merit? How do you decide I've got something here that's a little bit uh fresher than the one before or after it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think you know, one it's it's the same like wildlife photography. It's you start you start to look at the images and then you start to compare minute details, you know. You start to look at oh, how is the lava flowing in this image? How you know how is the light changing in relation to the lava that's also uh emitting light? It's something that is very dynamic, and then you you could, for example, take 20 images in the span of five minutes of the same composition, but because everything is moving, you'll compare them and you'll start to look at you know just small differences that make or break an image at that point. Uh and I think that's some uh a situation where my feel for perfectionism within my work is something that's very apparent. Is that uh people who've been with me on a workshop uh doing puffin photography, for example, I could spend 20 uh 20 minutes looking at a series of 50 images that are barely different, and I'll look at it and look at these small little details that for me make or break uh the that image. And I think you know, how to decide that, I think it's so it's so difficult. It's almost for me, it's you know, you have you can follow compositional rules and techniques and start with that, but then you yeah, for me, there's still somewhat of a feeling to it. It's like a feeling of why something works and why it doesn't work.
SPEAKER_02You mentioned light a minute ago, and and one of the things that, you know, as I imagine myself on some future date, you know, taking a picture of a volcano somewhere on the planet, because that is on my bucket list. The learning I would have to do really quick, because a volcano midday is not the same, and forget the actual changes to the rock, is not the same light source as it is at blue hour or golden hour, which is certainly not the same thing in the middle of the night. Yeah. Um, it seems to me that a volcano would be a really intense light challenge.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it is. Uh yeah. It's also yeah, it it is it is really challenging because it's it's almost like you're it's kind of like uh you would be photographing a cityscape, right? Because the light is within the city is also constantly changing. Um except that what makes it really difficult here is that uh lava can be moving so fast that you couldn't possibly bracket it, for example. Okay. Um like you know, this is one of the struggles that I've had when when doing uh night photography at the eruption, um, that everything's moving so fast, especially if you then try to combine that with, for example, the Northern Lights, that becomes really, really challenging. Uh, but yeah, it's not it's not something that I find is you know, it's not as simple as you rock up with your camera and you're gonna take some amazing, amazing photos. You'll photograph something amazing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you've taken an amazing photograph, if that makes sense. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Amazing. I I I love that distinction. I love that. Uh well, how important is your intent when you arrive at a volcano? Because are are you a you know basically a street photographer and you're gonna capture whatever you see, or do you say, no, I am going after, you know, are you are you more proactive in terms of what you are waiting to see?
SPEAKER_00It's sort of uh it goes both ways a little bit. Like one one of the things that I did in the beginning was uh I sort of had like a mental bucket list of images that I wanted to try and take at an eruption. And then uh that was sort of on the first day, and then after that, I kind of evolved into okay, what else can I be shooting here? Because this eruption, I thought in the beginning it was only gonna last a couple of days. Eventually uh we found out that it was gonna last quite a bit longer. And then I started to set challenges to myself. I said, like, okay, well, if everybody's uh sitting on this viewing hill uh on the west side, then maybe I'll go to the east side and try to do something different, or maybe I'll use my drone when everybody's using their camera, or vice versa. And that that's sort of how I started to tackle it. I started to challenge myself, almost like limit myself in a way to get better results or get more um yeah, more interesting images, because that forced me to uh how to say it, like that forced me to think and try and and problem solve. Um try kind of try and look at it as a puzzle, like how how am I gonna take this amazing photograph here when using only my wide wide angle lens or only my zoom lens or things like that. And then of course, what also happens, especially during our first eruption, is that this eruption changed a lot. There were new fissures that opened, there were new craters that formed, and some of the older craters shut down, and things were you know happening in phases, and that also helps a lot because then you can try and uh capture different aspects of it and different stages of it that sort of tell more a story of how that landscape uh kind of got formed.
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SPEAKER_02You you used a magic word there, something I've been I've been wanting to get to here for a couple minutes, and that is drone, because you said even though everything, you know, was magical in Iceland, it was once again becoming a little bit commonplace uh for you, just in you know, in your spirit as a photographer, until the drone came into your life. Yeah. Well, okay, why?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think um with drone photography, especially at eruptions, like in the beginning, it was really easy to get really close. Uh, because when you got really close, then you know you could use your camera, you could still walk around and find different angles to the same subject. But then after a while, as the lava field starts growing and starts expanding, uh that story changes because then you're further and further away from a subject, and it becomes harder and harder to make different and compelling compositions of it. And that's where a drone then comes in, because to me, a drone, a lot of people look at a drone as something, well, you can use it to fly really high and you can uh shoot everything from an aerial point of view. But the way I look at drones, especially in the last couple of years, that has evolved a lot for me, the way I look at it is I look at it as sort of a flying tripod, and it's a flying tripod that I can put anywhere in a 3D space. And once you realize that, it opens up a whole new world of photography because it means that you know you don't have to treat it as something that you fly high, you could treat it as something that flies really low and it gets in places where you could not possibly be as a human. And that just that doesn't just apply to to eruptions, that also applies to when I when I photograph the landscape uh here in the Icelandic Highlands, for example, I'll find really sharp and pointy cliffs, and then I'll fly next to them to kind of frame them in a way that you as a human, even if you would climb up on that mountain, you would not possibly be able to get to that position. And I think that's sort of once you start to realize that the potential of what you could do with that and be anywhere in a 3D space, that's sort of for me, that was a game changer. That was something that really it's like you know, it's almost like you've been doing photography in a 2D space in a flat surface, and all suddenly there is this um this third axis that you unlock and that opens up infinite possibilities. Oh my.
SPEAKER_02You know, one of your best known photographs is of a an eruption, but it starts to rain. Um so and this is a drone shot. Um beginning beginning, middle, and end. Tell me the story of taking that image.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so um it was uh this was just last year, and what was really interesting was that um I was actually um I woke up uh one morning uh to go on a holiday uh with my daughter to Belgium to visit family, and about five minutes before um the Europe, like five minutes before I woke up, uh an eruption began. And I woke up and I looked at my phone and I saw, what this can't be. This was like completely out of the blue, totally not forecast that we were still weeks away from a potential eruption in that area. But nature always surprises us. Uh so uh it was very interesting because then you know, pack up my stuff and go to the airport, and we drove past uh with my my five-year-old, we drove past uh a brand new volcanic erupting fissure and got on a plane and left. And I felt a little bit, you know, that was the first time the first time where I was in a sort of in a situation like that. And fortunately for me, um that eruption lasted uh until well after a week later when I came back to Iceland. Yeah, and then I decided, okay, well, I've missed I've missed a week, but now I'm gonna use the next days to uh to kinda yeah to kind of try and find new things to shoot. And one of the driving factors for me was that I noticed that people who were in Iceland, they had already sort of given up on photographing the eruption um because they've seen the the beginning, they've seen you know the big fissures and captured that. And most people seem to have moved on, and I thought, well, that's interesting, uh, because to me it doesn't really matter whether you see the beginning or the ending or the middle because everything is always different. So I decided to spend a lot of time on this. Um, and then one day, I think it was the second day, I went out to shoot. Um, I decided to hike uh to the area, and it had been raining a lot uh the day before, but there was like a three or four hour window uh where there was not gonna be any rain. So I decided to hike out there in the horrible, horrible mud. It was incredibly muddy to get there. Um and then I got there, I had about seven drone batteries on me, and I decided, okay, well, I'm gonna fly. And I have that many batteries um at the eruption because one of the things that I often do is I'll use the first battery and I'll just fly around and explore. How long does the battery last on your drone? Uh this is a Mavic 4. I think it's a rated for 45 minutes or something, but in reality.
SPEAKER_02Oh wow, okay. So you you got a lot of time. Okay.
SPEAKER_00In in reality, you'll probably get about half an hour, maybe, uh conditions. It's it's it's still pretty decent. Uh, but you know, half an hour uh half an hour flies uh very quickly, uh especially when you're you're having fun, you're exploring a little bit. So in in my case, I spend about I think I had like a battery I used to explore, so I understood what was there, what I what I could shoot, and then the next battery I used on flying really close to the crater. So based on the wind direction, I decided that there was one place where I could sort of almost sit with my drone on the rim, and I got these really amazing wide-angle shots of uh of the fountaining uh crater. And then I flew more and more. Um and then I was on my last button. And when I was on my last battery, I was near the crater, and then suddenly it starts raining really heavily, like torrential rain. And one thing I had never seen up until that point was that the rain immediately, because of the heat of the lava field, immediately started evaporating. And it's really odd because in Iceland uh it rains a lot, and we've seen many eruptions in rain, and I've never seen it quite like that. So I'm not sure if it has something to do with the humidity of the air or the dryness of the air around the eruption. That was different that day. But uh what happened was the entire crater during a rainstorm started to steam up, and you could see these like wisps of clouds kind of move over the lava field, and as they uh came closer to the actual lava flow, they would disappear. Really beautiful. Yeah, and all the while this started happening. The only thing I could hear was low battery warning, low battery warning. My remote was my remote was going crazy, and even for my taste, I had to I had to kind of fly back and say, like, oh my god, why am I missing this? Why am I missing this moment? And then I realized that in a stroke of genius, about two hours before, I had plugged my uh battery charger in my power bank, and I had completely forgotten about this until I came back with the empty battery, and then I realized I had a full battery left because I charged it from my battery from my uh from my power bank, and I was so happy. I was like, oh my god, I think I was almost like dancing on the spot.
SPEAKER_02This is when the theme music starts, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And uh I put in this battery and I started flying again, and I was making a video. I do I very often when I do videos, I don't do moving videos, I like to my videos to look like they're moving photographs, so very static. And when I was doing this, I started looking around and kind of looking to see if anyone else was recording this or was flying, and the only thing I could see was that I was almost the only one left standing there because everybody else had run away because of the heavy rain, um, and everybody was kind of packing up their stuff and nobody else was flying a drone. And I was just so shocked at this. And of course, you know, I probably was in a really good spot when I came back on my empty battery because I was probably already flying longer than most other people. And from the ground, you could not actually see the crater anymore because there was so much steam that the entire eruption vanished. But uh fortunately for me, I knew the secret, and I knew that if you flew into it, there was still a place where you could see the crater with all the steam moving around it. It is a remarkable shot. It was it was incredible, and I think that moment I'll never forget uh I felt really miserable. I was soaking wet because I had been outside in this rain for such a long time, and I was walking back with all my empty batteries, and all around me were people who looked really miserable, and they were undoubtedly, they were undoubtedly feeling just as miserable as me. With the only difference was that I was the only one walking around there with a big smile on my face because I knew what I had on my memory card. And that was a really special feeling for me.
SPEAKER_02In my ignorance here, the heavy rain didn't knock the drone out of the sky.
SPEAKER_00No, it was totally fine. Um and I actually I actually fly in heavy rain quite often. Um and I think the propellers they keep most of the the rain off the drone. And in I mean DJI, obviously they don't recommend you to do this, but I've never never had any problems with uh with flying my drone in heavy rain, uh which is not to say that it's totally safe, but yeah, I do it quite often.
SPEAKER_02You don't have a drone melting in a caldera somewhere.
SPEAKER_00Nope. Uh actually I have I have uh I have melted the underside of my drone, but I've never lost one. Um and I try to I try to be very careful with this because I really want my you know first of all, I value my equipment. I'm not gonna waste it uh in a volcano, but I also don't feel you know like it's such pollution that I'm like I don't want that. I just don't want that to happen. Uh but it has never happened to me, fortunately.
SPEAKER_02We we're gonna talk about, I mean, you you also teach uh a lot of workshops, and one of your workshops is a drone masterclass. Um so we'll get to the teaching in just a second. But another story that I've heard um you just tell that that I find um inspirational, frankly, um is you went over to Greenland a while back and and you you booked little boat excursions three days in a row to essentially the same place. Um and and wound up, you know, you knew in advance what you're gonna wind up with was not three versions of the same thing. So tell me about your planning, but then also tell me about the experience.
SPEAKER_00Well, so I think you're referring to the um to West Greenland, to Disco Bay, probably close to Iludisat. And the first the first time I went there, I went in the middle of winter. And the reason I went in the middle of winter, most people would probably not go there in winter because it's uh temperatures between minus 30 and minus 40 degrees Celsius. Sounds like really bone-chilling cold for me. And um, I basically went out there because this was the very first opportunity I got after COVID to go to Greenland. Um, and I decided okay, well, I'm just gonna make the most of it. Um, and I went there and then I uh booked with every single supplier in Ilisat uh different boat trips because I kind of wanted to find out whether there was a difference, but also I also wanted to see how people approached um going out there. Uh and to my surprise, uh, it doesn't really matter who you book booked with at the time, uh it was always the same, the same guys on the same boat that took me out. Uh so that was uh that was starting to get funny when I showed up there on the fourth day. Uh I think it was my fifth, fifth boat trip or something, and it was the same guy. Ah, you again. Yeah, again. Uh and it was it was so interesting because this sort of for me, this ice fjord and the icebergs and the the slush ice and the the sea ice, it's something that is equally as fascinating to me as photographing a moving landscape created by an eruption, because everything there is changing all the time. And you would go out there every day, the light would be different, but the ice would be different, the conditions would be different. And this is something uh, you know, I go to Greenland every single year uh on multiple trips, and even even after this now my fifth year that I'm going to Greenland, I think. Um even after all this time, I still take different images and different I find different things to photograph, and it's something that will endlessly fascinate me because it's always changing, it's always fresh, it's always new what you're shooting, and not a single photograph taken in the place could possibly be the same unless you're standing right next to each other on that boat from that angle in the same light. Uh it will always be different.
SPEAKER_02Are you the same photographer when you're doing landscape as you're when you're chasing puffins or little Arctic fox?
SPEAKER_00I'm different in the sense that um with the landscapes, I'm probably more uh energetic and probably more you know all over the place trying to look at everything. And I think with wildlife you need to do the opposite of that. You need to be more toned, toned down, you need to be more observing of a single scene. Um, and I think in that sense I'm I'm very different uh in the way how I do things.
SPEAKER_02But what what are you chasing when you're doing landscape versus what are you chasing when you're doing wildlife?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for me, landscapes is all about capturing unique moments, unique scenery with interesting light, interesting weather conditions that make it really stand out. Um, and wildlife for me is more about trying to capture intimate moments and uh special moments that the animal or animal behavior that could be special. So, for example, with the puffins last uh just a couple of weeks ago when I was uh running one of my workshops, uh we had a really interesting few days where the weather was really stormy, it was really windy, and what we then focused on was the behavior of the puffins around the cliffs and all they try to. I don't know if you know this about puffins, but when it's really windy, they're so light they can't actually land facing forward, so they try to kind of hover, you know, they they they hover backwards, they try to kind of park themselves backwards onto the cliff because they have better control over speed when they do that. And it's really interesting to see how they move around the cliff and how they kind of use the wind to do that, but also a lot of the puffins in bad weather, they will kind of nestle into their feathers, um, so they kind of cozy up and show like a very different behavior. So we were focusing a lot on that. And you'd be surprised. Like some people they ask me, you know, you go to this this island full of puffins, Grimmsay, you you go there every year uh and you spend five days there photographing the same bird. Isn't that boring? And then then I think you know, this it's not bor to me, it's not boring at all because an animal, like if you just want to see a puffin, you can do that in any other place, I think. If you want to truly see their behavior and see what they do in different circumstances, different light, you need five days or more to do that. And my entire portfolio of the puffin is so different year after year, because all the conditions are different, the food that they get out of the ocean is different, the wind is different, the light is different. Um I every year I still make photographs where I'm like, huh, I've never seen that before, or I've never been able to capture a photograph before. This is now next year, will be my sixth or seventh year that I go and do this. Uh, and I still make different images. So yeah, it's incredibly fascinating.
SPEAKER_02There there's a remarkable skill set for wildlife photographers. You know that that seems like a contradiction. You have to have infinite patience, but then you have to be instantly ready for the dynamic. Um, so you know, it's like you're sitting on edge for hours and hours and hours. Yeah, basically. So, okay, we we just got a few minutes left here, but tell me about your workshops. Tell me about your teaching. Um, because I, you know, there's all sorts of different styles for people that are leading workshops. Some are very instructive heavy. You know, use this filter, use this lens. Some are more I'm gonna put you in a place and and trust your own talent. What is your approach to being a workshop director and leader and guide?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I have uh sort of like a blend, a blend of uh those two things, like uh for and it depends on what workshop I'm on. So for example, and you you have lots of them, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'll do lots of different things. Uh uh, for example, the puffin workshop that I run is all about wildlife photography and how to, you know, how to approach wildlife photography and how to find compelling images. And what I do there, for example, is we go out and shoot, and on the cliffs, it's incredibly heavy, uh incredibly difficult to stand next to someone and then tell them this is how you should be shooting this bird. It's almost impossible. So what we do is we go out there, we shoot, and then the morning after we look at three of your best images, three of your worst images, and then we talk about why they are the best and why they are the worst. And I think those sessions, they are incredibly, incredibly educational for anyone who goes on a trip like that, even if you're uh even if you're a really seasoned wildlife photographer, because it allows you to see how other people look at images and how other people are looking at the same cliff side that you're also photographing. Uh so that's very, you know, it's almost like a a trial and error kind of kind of approach that I have on those trips. Um with with the drone photography trips that I run in the Highlands of Iceland, um, I basically drive you to unique places, and it's almost, in a sense, the workshop is all about um it's almost like I'm going out on a photo on a on a photography trip and I have three people with me, and I kind of go where I think we will get the best photographs. So I don't say today we're going to that place and take these photographs. I just decide in the morning, these are the weather conditions based on my local knowledge. I decide we're gonna go to that spot. Uh, and then we spend several hours there, and I show people some of the um interesting angles to it, and then everybody kind of explores on their own while I'm helping them get the shot that they want to kind of help them perfect the shot that they want. And I think that's really, you know, it's uh the best way to learn drone photography is not by sitting behind behind a computer and watching videos, it's by being out there and doing it. Um, and on those workshops, it's really, you know, like I try to get you to the yeah, like the best location with the best possible weather conditions at that moment. And for me, that is usually something that's very moody and foggy because that works really well in those areas. And then I try to show you how I look at the landscape. Sometimes that means we go to locations that I um that I know, uh, but maybe somewhere halfway on when going to that location, we stop somewhere I've never shot before and we try to explore it. And based on that, you also see how I look at new scenes uh and how I try to find compelling images there. And yeah, that kind of, you know, it's like I have different different approaches on different workshops, but it's always very experience focused. So for me, the the experience of doing photography is probably more important than getting getting the next uh Instagram banger. Uh because I find I find being out in nature is probably that's what it's about. That's why why I do landscape photography and nature photography. Uh and for me that's always gonna come first. And of course, we the goal is always to get good images, but sometimes that doesn't work out if the weather doesn't cooperate, but then you can experience the weather as well.
SPEAKER_02We we we are after experience and images and not likes. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Uh man, I mean I'm look- I'm looking at your gallery. I'm impressed. I I am jealous as hell. Um, you know, all over these places, and and in in every gallery, and we should mention, you know, you've got Svalbard, you've got Patagonia, you've got the UK, Madeira in there. So this is not just all Iceland stuff. Um, but some of these in here, I'm looking at the images, and they are just deeply moving. That there is a talent to landscape photography, um, where you're going, you're you're taking the documentary value, and then you're bringing in the fine art vision, and what you've got simply then resonates with someone else and saying, yeah, there's something about the emotion of this place um that is now in our conversation. Thank you very much. I have enjoyed this conversation. I'm deeply impressed with the work, man. Um, and and I I hope thousands and thousands of people sign up for the workshops because I think every single one of them is gonna be worth it.
SPEAKER_00Thanks all for having me. It was a great I had a great time uh chatting with you as well frames.
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