Whenever I choose a new piece of equipment, I usually do that based on how much my choice will improve my images.

I usually say that my car is my most expensive piece of kit and whenever this comes to my mind, it brings along the idea that "someone passionate about the outdoors and everything around them should not drive a big and fuel hungry 4x4"...

Before having a 4x4 I had the romantic idea that I could drive to the middle of nothing, hop off the car and create fantastic images out of the blue... This image is actually the only one that jumped in front of me while driving off-road. Actually it would be more correct to say that it jumped behind me, because I first saw it in the rear view mirror when returning back home from an unproductive morning.

I stopped the car and placed my Bronica SQA with the 50mm lens in the tripod really close to the ground and took some time working on the composition as I had to shoot through a fence and none of the wholes seamed to provide a decent perspective. When I finally got what I wanted, the sun was covered by a cloud...

When I first started with infrared I had the idea that sunlit scenes would work better, nowadays I know that overcast days are equally good and sometimes preferable... That day I sat on the ground in silence and waited for half an hour for the sun to come up again and shot two frames with Maco IR820c through a B+W 092 filter at ISO 6 and 3, the frame shot at ISO 6 is quite thin, but actually scans better than the other...

With time I came to understand that off road driving detracts my attention from possible images, it almost feels like going from photographer mode into pilot mode... Most times only some time after stopping the car and hearing silence for a while I can feel I'm back into my photography pace... I won't sell my car due to this, I'm human and not 100% coherent... I still use it in order to get to places faster than I would if I was walking... I just don't drive around looking for images anymore...

I usually don't prepare myself extensively before traveling in terms of the kind of images I'm expecting to create.



This image is an exception. I've seen images of done by Art Wolfe, Bob Khrist and series of other photographers done from this same exact view point, still I could not avoid being attracted to climb up and do the same that others did... Actually I was so eager on doing so that when I got to top of the elevation besides the waterfall and opened the backpack i found out that I had forgotten one of my cameras in the car... I left all my equipment at the top and ran downhill...

Imagine yourself running besides an enormous waterfall, jumping down on wet grass, almost feeling like a drop of water... This is what I recall now when I look at this image... I picked up the camera in the car, climbed back up and tried all sorts of possibilities, along with all sorts of medium I carried: Black and White, Color Slide, Infrared Film, and Digital. The image you see here is the infrared film version, I've also printed and like the black and white and slide film versions, but this is the one I find to be more attached to my own vision and also to my own intentions when I traveled to Iceland...

The image was shot on Efke IR 820c through an Heliopan RG715 IR Filter on my Bronica SQAi with a 50mm lens, I had only tried this film once before traveling to Iceland, my tests along with my previous experiences with Maco IR820c lead me to believe that the film an filter combination I was using where 1 to 2 stops faster that what I found them to be after the trip...

Because I usually load infrared film in subdued light I only have a back with 12 shots for a whole day, most of the times I bracket my exposures to +1 so this leaves me with 6 possible images... This time I instinctively bracketed to +2 and this is actually one of the phew acceptable exposures from this trip using this film... Did I say something about being prepared?...

If you ever wonder what was the camera I forgot in the car... It was the digital... I still did not edit my digital images from the trip... You may ask yourself if it was worth to go back for a camera when actually I did fine with the one I already had with me...

I probably went back for the wrong reason, with the right one being the fact that going back and forth on the landscape just for the sake of being there is more rewarding than the accessory act of creating images...