Photographing Greenland From Above
View over the Ilulissat Icefjord prior to my plane landing in Greenland.
Greenland is a massive wilderness. These aerial photos showcase Greenland's monumental proportions.
Touching Down In Ilulissat, Greenland
The Ilulissat Icefjord is a wild and beautiful place in western Greenland.
I had a great time photographing and hiking around the town of Ilulissat, which is situated on the edge of the Ilulissat Icefjord.
I even did an all night hike, under the midnight sun, which was a truly amazing experience.
The images in this post were made near the end of my flight from Reykjavik to Ilulissat.
As you can see the image at the top of this post was made from inside the plane just as its landing gear had come down.
As well as helping to frame the scene below, the warm yellow color of the undercarriage and landing gear of the plane produced a striking color contrast with the bluish color of the ice.
I made the image with a Canon 5D Mark II camera and a Canon 24-105 mm f/4 L series lens at 24 mm. The exposure details were as follows:
Shutter Speed: 1/800 second
Aperture: f/8
ISO: 400
It’s not easy photographing through glass or the hardened plastic used in airplane windows.
What’s more these windows are rarely clean and the often dense, curved shape adversely affects image sharpness.
Nonetheless I think the amazing scenery and the unusual, birds eye perspective minimizes any potential technical deficiencies in these photos.
Birdseye perspective of the ice on the way to Ilulissat in Greenland.
Challenging Perspective
The second aerial image in this series is more abstract. Photographing from such an extreme viewpoint dramatically reduces the sense of three dimensional space in the image.
That’s because, without any obvious sense of scale, it’s impossible to judge distance in this particular landscape.
That challenges our understanding of perspective and moves the image away from reality, which I think makes for an intriguing result.
How long would it take you to walk through a landscape like that? Days, probably longer. And then there’s the ice and crevices to manage. Yikes!
I made this second, more abstract image, with my Canon 5D Mark II camera and a Canon 24-105 mm f/4 L series lens at 93 mm.
Exposure details were as follows:
Shutter Speed: 1/1000 second
Aperture: f/7.1
ISO: 400
Despite the lack of critical sharpness in this second image, it does exhibit an interesting abstract quality. And that’s why I’ve published it here.
The angle at which I’ve photographed the image at the top of this post, together with the definite foreground, mid ground and background elements within the frame, make for an easier to understand image.
But photographing almost directly from above, as is the case with the image of the ice, is a much more visually challenging image.
I prefer the first image, but the second, more abstract photo certainly tells the story of flying over Greenland, this huge country of ice and rock.
