Ice Capades by Marsel van Oosten

Early this year I was traveling in Iceland, scouting for locations for a new tour. I was prepared to see a lot of spectacular landscapes, people had even warned me that I would get hooked, but it still greatly exceeded my expectations. As a result I didn't cover a lot of distance each day—too much to see and photograph! And as a result of that, I stayed much longer than anticipated—which was not too bad by the way.

This was taken at sunrise. I had set my alarm clock very early to check out the weather, and it didn't look very promising—completely overcast. The weather in Iceland changes quickly though, so I decided to give it a try anyway. When I arrived at the beach the clouds already started to move away and the sky opened up a little. Enough for some light and color to come through. Moments like this can disappear quickly, so I had to move fast.

In order to get my shutter speed slow enough to get some movement in the water, I had to drop the ISO to 50 and stop down to f/18. I don't usually like to stop down that much because of diffraction issues, but the 14-24 does not take any filters, so there was not much else that I could do. I ended up shooting three exposures to capture all the brightness levels and later merged them in PS.

Equipment Used: Nikon D3x, AF-S 14-24/2.8 @ 14mm, 0.5s @ f/18, ISO 50, tripod.