fine graded m[…]

m[…] stands for “monochrome” or “monster”

Lake Másvatn, view to the North

October-8 2017, on our way from Akureyri to the East of Iceland we passed the calm lake of Másvatn, a few miles before the geothermals of Mývatn. Attracted by the silence of the area and the untouched surface of the water I decided to take some photographs of the calm water.

on the left: Northern Iceland, from Akureyri to lake Mývatn; in the middle: Lake Másvatn and lake Mývatn; on the right: Lake Másvatn, our position, taking my pictures to the North. Source and Copyright © Microsoft 2018.

Two single images, slightly differently processed – can you spot the difference?

This is monochrome – not just black&white. I love those tones!

After a while – struggling for the right composition, playing with tonality and adjusting the contrasts – I asked our daughters Cécile and Olivia to carefully throw a couple of small stones into the water; the target was just a few meters in distance in front of me – in order to get some interesting foreground patterns on the water surface.

At the agreed-on signal they perfectly synchronized their stone’s throw; it was a  pleasure to see them throwing their stones into the water right to the target, and finally I managed to get the image I wanted – the fine pattern of rings of water overlapping each other, with the soft modulated and fine articulated grey tones in the background, the clouds reflecting in the calm surface of water. What a fantastic scenery!

Pattern of rings of water

My setup was as always as simple as possible: All my images were made with an OLYMPUS E-PL7 with the Panasonic LUMIX G 20 mm F1.7 II ASPH attached, ISO was set to 100 and the exposure was 1/250 s at F8. All images were converted from RAW (using OLYMPUS Viewer 3 Version 2.3) to a 16bit TIFF file and then finally processed in Adobe Lightroom 5.7.1.

m[…] stands for “monster”

At home again – while processing the files and writing this blog post – I discovered a black spot – something undefined – could it be a seal? – just in the middle of the image, in about 50 m distance in front of me – it seems to swim to the left … Are there any seals in fresh water in Iceland? It was quite far away from us; first I thought it was caused by the stone’s throw of Cécile and Olivia – but I think it is to far away and for sure to large.

Now – would I dare to swim in that calm water? Hmm … an Icelandic Nessie m[onster] maybe?

Seal? Fish? Nessie m[onster]?

Are you interested in sea monsters and other creatures? See this book: A Book of Creatures, highly recommended!

Source and Copyright © A Book of Creatures, https://abookofcreatures.com/category/iceland/

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