One of the greatest pleasures in editing photographers work is finding an interesting visual nugget that may have already been missed. In years of  looking at raw material a common trait I have spotted is that photographers who are headed to an assignment see something they are attracted to and take a picture of it thinking "that looks interesting".  The assignment is shot, the pictures are quickly edited, captioned and transmitted but the picture that was instinctively taken because it was interesting is often condemned to the darkness of the archive folder on the backup hard drive, never to be transmitted because it was not part of the assignment.

I was asked by our Hanoi based photographer Kham to have a second look at his file of the state visit of East Timor's President Jose Ramos Horta to Vietnam; a good selection of handshakes, parade inspections and smiling suits. Then a pleasant surprise - at the end of the file were eleven frames of a fully dressed woman, nose and mouth covered with mask, wearing a traditional Vietnamese hat wading chin deep in water.  

Immediately questions came into my head, probably the same ones that are in your head now. Why was this person wading chin deep in water? Why are they wearing a face mask? Why are they wearing a hat? All questions I asked Kham. He told me that he had chatted with her and she was looking for mussels to sell, is 60 years old and comes from 150k outside Hanoi. I am sure what President Jose Ramos Horta and his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Minh Triet had to talk about was very interesting but I just want to know more about this woman - unlike the presidential meeting, an everyday sight for Kham.

 A 60-year-old woman wades through neck-deep water to collect mussels and shells to sell, at West Lake in Hanoi April 26, 2010. The woman, who came from Thai Binh province, 150 km south of Hanoi, spends about 8 to 10 hours on water to earn about 60,000 dong (about $3). REUTERS/Kham

Hopefully, in the near future, our feature picture pages will be filled with more images of this woman and her lifestyle, all questions answered. As a final thought it crossed my mind just how similar a picture editors job is to this woman daily activity (although considerably more comfortable), searching for nuggets.

 

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Sometimes you don’t realize how lucky you have been, though you always seem to realize immediately when you have been unlucky. I can safely admit that with a few exceptions (known only to me), I can truly feel that I have been lucky because of the sight I beheld Thursday night. April 22nd is a national holiday here in Iceland as it heralds the first official day of summer. Never mind that when I drove to the town of Vik it was a white-out blizzard or that the temperature never gets much above freezing during the day. The day was a special one for the whole country, and with clear skies I wanted to make sure I got a good parting photo of my volcano friend before I packed up my bags and headed back to New York.

I was staying in the same hotel as Ingolfur Juliusson (Ingo), the Reuters freelancer based here in Iceland, and Gunnar Bondal, a photographer for Dagens Næringsliv – the Norwegian Business Daily. We decided to head out to get a good vantage point and take some nighttime photos and to take advantage of the rare clear night. During this time of year it does not get dark until after 9pm and even then the sun doesn’t stop illuminating things until 10pm or so. This meant that even though we were in place by roughly 9pm there was a lot of light to take slow shutter speed photos of the lava and ash clouds.

It seems that every day this volcano takes on a different personality. In the beginning, the ash was dark, almost black, and unbelievably forcefully shot skyward in massive and mushroom shaped plumes. After the first day or two, the ash turned to gray and white. And some evenings the only thing you could really see was the lava because the sky and ash were too dark. On this night, the moon was shining and it was possible to get some nice frames of the red glow of the lava and abstract shapes in the ash plume.

Lava spews from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano April 22, 2010. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

I set up my clamp/car window rig again as Ingo and Gunnar spread out with their tripods to get some photos of the “orange stuff” as Ingo put it. Unfortunately, where we had the car (aka my tripod) parked was too windy and my lava trails looked like the slime trail of a drunk slug due to the wind rocking the vehicle. I suggested we move to the side of a cliff to keep the wind off us. We could also keep warmer as the temperature steadily dropped farther and farther below freezing.

Once the jeep was snug against the cliff we spread out. Everyone was trying different focal lengths and compositions and since we are all photographers no-one was in a rush to leave. It was approaching midnight and the light had gone too low for me to use my live view or the viewfinder to focus my camera, so when I switched bodies I had to use a much more menial method. I began at infinity (no matter what anyone says it’s not automatically focused on things far away because it’s on infinity) and ever so slowly turned the focus ring to take a picture.

I would then check the picture by zooming in and seeing if it was sharp. It took about 5 or 6 photos to get the image sharp but it worked relatively well. I then proceeded to play with the shutter speeds and f-stops to see the different effects.

I was focusing mainly on the lava and its glow on the ash cloud as I hadn’t seen it as strong as this before. With the distant rumbling of the mountain, I shot some tight images with my Canon 1DMKIV and a 70-200 to get the lava trails before switching to my Canon 5DMKII and a 16-35mm for some wide shots. Shortly after getting the focus locked in I looked at one of my images to see a slight green tinge in the top of the photo. It took me a moment before I realized what I was seeing was the beginning of the Aurora Borealis peeking through.

To the naked eye this looks like a whisper of a cloud and you can only really see the color in the camera so I widened my composition to make sure the Northern Lights were in the frame and pressed the shutter as fast as I could. To keep the camera still (as mentioned in an earlier entry, I didn’t bring a cable release) I was using the 10 second timer and was pressing the button as fast as I could.

To my amazement the lights began to brighten and brighten until the entire sky was filled with tendrils of green light snaking east to west across the top of the volcano and directly above us. It was incredible. The lights were so bright I had to stop my camera down from 20 and 30 second exposures to 10 and 15 second exposures to prevent from over-exposing my frames.

A slightly over-exposed view of the Northern Lights April 22, 2010. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

I couldn’t believe that I was seeing this, much less in a position to photograph it. On top of that, I was photographing it with the bonus element of a volcano in the background! I was so excited I was literally laughing. There is no feeling like knowing you are taking a good picture and this is probably one of three times in my life that I knew I would come out with something that I liked. Ingo and Gunnar were equally as excited and no-one really talked much beyond the occasional “wow” or “I can’t believe this is happening” as we all clicked away madly. By this point Ingo was feeling pretty cold so I traded him my seat in the car for his tripod and ran to take photos of the lights straight above.

One of these wound up (quite by happy accident I assure you) having the volcano peeking into the corner. The lights slowly grew in intensity until the sky was filled with them before they almost suddenly disappeared, showing themselves for perhaps a half an hour or so in total.

We stuck around a bit longer before packing up and heading home with the heater on full blast across the dirt roads of southern Iceland to our hotel talking non-stop about the sight we had just seen. It was incredible and I hope that my images convey even a fraction of the natural splendor that is almost commonplace here in Iceland. I have been humbled, and I do consider myself lucky, not because I took some pretty pictures, but because I got to be in the position to take them and was able to witness the event in the first person. This was one time that I knew I was lucky as the event happened before me. Don’t think for a moment that I don’t appreciate it, because I do. I hope you enjoy my attempt to capture it and share with anyone who loves to look at pictures.

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