Orsolya Haarberg - Iceland 06

In my previous report I wrote about revisiting the Myvatn area. During the last two weeks of our stay, my husband, Erlend and I, continued our nostalgic trip in Iceland, starting with Jökulsárlón and then to Landmannalaugar.
However, first of all I collected my new friend, a Nikon D3 camera, which would have been great to have during the entire trip, but it is never too late!

It is good to know that Nikon finally has a camera that makes almost everything possible. Many thanks to Nikon for kindly supporting me with this equipment on my mission!

Jökulsárlón itself had not changed much since we left but it was a totally different experience this time, especially its wildlife. The nice male eiders left Jökulsárlón, and not many seals were residing in the meltwater lake any longer. The tern-colony had also disappeared, although the birds did not move far away – some chicks still needed to be fed so they were lying on the lake shore waiting for their parents to bring food. Their activity in Jökulsárlón was varied and depended on the amount of fish coming from the sea to the lake. If fish was in abundance, they were only interrupted in their busy fishing activity by the great skua, whose appearance always caused great panic among the terns. The great skua has its largest Icelandic breeding population in this area, keeping the terns constantly on alert for them, but it does not always prove enough to save their chicks – I have often witnessed that a skua managed to take young terns in order to feed their own hungry young.

I also observed many snow buntings, who had become a little overweight since our last visit, due to abundant food supply nearby the busy parking place.

So this time there were other things to take pictures of at Jökulsárlón.

The rhyolite mountains of Landmannalaugar were as beautiful as they were in June – this time without snow. We drove back there with the plan of walking part of the Hot Spring Road from Landmannalaugar to Hraftinnusker (our earlier trip to Markarfljótsgljúfur was at the other end of the trail), but the weather was not favourable. Whilst waiting for the right walking conditions, we were taking pictures nearby Landmannalaugar again. This was very inspiring, despite recurring rain-showers and spotlights only came during the hours when the sun was at its highest. After four days of waiting, with a forecast of continuously grey and rainy weather, we postponed our walk on the Hot Spring Road yet again…

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Staffan Widstrand - Flatanger, Norway 02

The Eagle has landed

Back for another number of sessions with the incredible sea eagles in Flatanger, Nord Trondelag, Norway. With the help from famous “Eagle Man”, Ole Martin Dahle we experience 7-20 eagle stoops per day, often at almost too close range for the cameras.
Ole runs wildlife photo tour company Norway Nature (www.norway-nature.com) and works with showing his area’s nature jewels to a fast-growing number of European nature lovers. During just two weeks with Ole Martin I have met among his guests; people from Finland, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Spain.

We start the afternoon with some serious fishing for “eagle-sized” fish. They have to be big enough, so the many gulls can’t swallow them or fly away with them. But still not too big, so that the eagle can’t fly away with it. Ole Martin talks a lot about The Living Sea, and the truth of that word is proven on a daily basis. There is incredibly much fish. They are everywhere to be seen on the Sonar, in layer after layer. Sometimes the schools of fish are so dense, that the line and sinker has difficulties going through them, and gets stopped on its way down into the deep!

After some 20 minutes of fishing with only one line, we have about 20 kilos of fish! Most of them Sei, or Coalfish, “The Willow warbler of the Sea”, being the most common larger fish species here by far. But also the darting, shimmering Mackerel and the odd, big-mouthed Cod.
Then we start towards the nearest pair of eagles, with a cloud of Herring gulls and Greater Black-backed gulls following us everywhere. Ole Martin knows about 12 pairs of sea eagles that he visits and regularly feeds with fish, something he has done for over 20 years, so they are all good old friends. Often the eagles come flying out to the boat, checking out if there is anything to eat soon!

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Orsolya Haarberg - Iceland 05

By the end of July the days became noticeably shorter. It was a strange experience after living two months in almost continuous daylight and living/working during the night. Through this experience I can now go to sleep for 2-3 hours during the night without being afraid that I loose a special opportunity, in terms of light condition.

As mentioned in my last report, in the last phase of my Iceland trip, I wanted to revisit the places with which I felt a special connection. The first area was Myvatn, the volcanic lake surrounded by the gems of nature: the Hverarönd at Námafjall, Leirhnjúkur and the waterfalls of the Jökulsárgljúfur National Park.

I needed to spend some more time at Hverarönd after I had to drop my visit to Hveravellir due to bad roads. This is where one can find several steam vents, hot springs and boiling mudpools just beside the main road. The power of nature, the steam and the colourful sulphur deposits rising from the unseen and scary depths of the Earth, make this place very special for everyone, both aboriginals and people from mainland Europe. The whole place is ever-changing – you can never get the same light conditions, the same amount of steam and the same patterns in the mudpools, not to mention the fast changing wind directions making it very difficult to compose a picture at the steam vents. Every day is a new experience, so I spent many days at the hot spring area before I was ready to move on.

Leirhnjúkur is close to Námafjall and is one of the places with the most recent volcanic activity in Iceland. Here, eruptions took place several times in the last decades, therefore it is covered by relatively fresh lava fields and acidic steam is released from between the lava stones.

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Staffan Widstrand - Finland 02

Wolves, bears and wolverines the same night, in Kuhmo, Kainuu, Finland –

As if these many dozens of bear meetings were not enough, it would just get better. I continued in Finland, a bit south along the border to Russia to Lassi Rautiainens (www.articmedia.fi) impressive system of professional photo hides, outside the town of Kuhmo. Rautiainen, a reknowned photographer himself, Nature Photographer of the Year in Finland 2007 and also a member of the Wild Wonders of Europe team of photographers, here runs the only place in the whole world where you stand a very good chance of seeing both bears, wolves and wolverines during the same night, and often even at quite close range as well. 12 different hides in forest, in bogs, beside lakes and ponds, offer amazing close encounters with the large carnivores.

A real privilege to have seven bears walking around your hide, bear safe of course, built in thin plywood and cotton cloth…

And two wolves chasing one of the bears off and on. Then a wolverine tries to sneak by and grab a bite, gets seen by the wolves, who are suddenly four of them, and they chase the wolverine high up a nearby tree, where he then has to spend the following hours, while the wolves are keeping watch under the tree.

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Staffan Widstrand - Finland 01

Photo enthusiast bears in Suomussalmi, Kainuu, Finland

A very special mission: to photograph bears in Kainuu, in north-eastern Finland, just on the border to Russia. Something which used to be a very difficult task, but nowadays has become unbelievably easy. Due to a couple of very efficient and professional bear-safari operators in the area.

I started at Martinselkonen Erakeskus, (www.martinselkosenerakeskus.com) near Suomussalmi, and decided to try some wireless remote camera work on the many bears there. I had no idea how the bears would react. So I put up the camera on a tree stump, 20 metres from the hide that I was in, so I could observe it all the time. The camera, was put in a waterproof, protective casing, built specifically for this mission by the National Geographic Magazine tech wizards David Mathews and Kenji Yamaguchi. Thanks for that, guys!

The bears showed immediate interest. Maybe even too much interest…

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Orsolya Haarberg - Iceland 04

During the first three weeks of July I experienced high and low days.

First of all, from experience the optimal length of a photography trip is 4-6 weeks. When out in the field, I am working very intensively. No free days, no weekends, unless the weather is unsuitable for photography (then I work on the computer), so I simply get exhausted out of frustration. During the first 6 weeks in Iceland, the weather was almost continuously good or acceptable…  In addition, after the 5th week, I left this amazing place, Landmannalaugar, so there was very little chance that the next stop would be as stimulating, even if it was the famous Geysir or Gullfoss. This proved to be right … 

I always thought that the Geysir is set in a wilderness or at least surrounded by volcanic landscape. Instead, it is located among gentle hills and farmland. The name means spouting hot spring, it is the largest geyser of its kind in the world. It is not active at the moment, but its smaller brother, Strokkur, is erupting every few minutes. Fortunately for many but unfortunately for nature photographers, the Geysir is a man-made tourist attraction with stoned footpaths and benches looking out over the hot springs. They are also surrounded by a kind of fence that made me turn back (which, at that moment, was not very hard to do…). So even though geysers are amazing natural phenomena, the surroundings made me decide not to spend more time than necessary in this place.
Gullfoss is very close to the Geysir. This is the well known “rainbow waterfall” which is a famous landmark and almost everyone who comes to Iceland has a picture of it. I have seen many “standard” postcard pictures of this place, so I tried to look for a different and less known angle to capture this huge cascade.
After this episode my husband, Erlend, and I, headed towards the Hveravellir hot spring area but after about 20 kilometres of driving on a rough gravel road, we felt so sorry for our car that we turned back. Driving there and back would have taken us approx. 200 km driving on this gravel road, not of the best quality, so we decided not to visit that place.

This was the “low point” in our Iceland trip but soon after, things began to brighten up again.

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Staffan Widstrand - Sardinia

Some species leave a big hole in our souls when they disappear.

The Cork oak was just being harvested in many areas, and although it might seem gruesome to strip trees of their bark, it actually doesnt harm them. They grow new bark, which is harvested again, ten years between each time. The result is an intact forest cover with very high biodiversity. When demand for cork goes down, so do many cork oak forests, which are then replaced with other crops. So if you care about the wonderful cork oak forests in the Mediterranean, please do drink a healthy amount of wine. But just from bottles, OK? And only from bottles sealed with natural corks – not plastic or screw-on ones! And definitely no Bag-in-box stuff!

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Niall Benvie - Fliess, Austria 07

See Niall on Landeck TV (in German) at http://www.landeck.tv/php/videodetail.php?id=38624

Day 8. 9^th July

0930. Today I have company (and a catcher) - biology student Philipp - who is highly adept at finding models. Outstanding amongst these is yet another grasshopper; this one has greatly thickened tibia inviting the name of “the Pop-Eye grasshopper” (many of those I’ve photographed lack English names, so why not?). A scorpion fly and a snake fly are equally fascinating. Both display a lot of attitude on set, more than making up for their small size. The scorpion fly has an extraordinary set of fused mouthparts that form a “beak” with a bizarre biting process at the end of it. This, and the intricacy of a caterpillar that closely resembles a writhing red cactus, really makes the design of mammals look pretty unimaginative and perfunctory. Clearly, the Creator was worn out by his work on the lower orders…which is perhaps why he overlooked the fundamental incompatibility between a woman’s pelvis and her baby’s head – the best evidence yet that God is a man. It is certainly not a very intelligent design.

1130. I’ve set up in the shade to keep the animals calmer but it is more than ten degrees cooler so I go back to the car for a fleece. When I return, Philipp is talking to a local woman with her children and mother who are interested in what we are doing. I don’t quite know what is said, what hints are dropped and suggestions made but just before they leave, they ply us with apple; fresh, juicy, crispy apple. I try not to eat it with indecent haste.

It’s great to watch the reaction of people, especially children, when they see a small creature magnified on the camera’s. Initial bemusement or disdain for my choice of subject soon turns to awe as they see each elaborate detail sharply resolved. This is quite the opposite process from landscape photography where the object is to make the overwhelming, the sublime, the ephemeral into something that can be taken in at a glance. Hardcore landscape workers shoot large format to resolve as much detail as possible but at the end of it all, it is still a reductive process. Taking something small, and to many people, insignificant or even repulsive and making it visible and fascinating is very appealing and fits in perfectly with the Wild Wonders tagline – unseen, unexpected, unforgettable.

Steadily I work through the specimens Philipp brings until moving on to a different meadow where we find another, cryptically-coloured species of grasshopper that alarms potential predators by flashing red wings as it leaps through the air. Read the rest of this entry »

Niall Benvie - Fliess, Austria 06

Day 6. 7th July.

0930. I take back what I said about this being a Dry Country: it has rained all night and is still doing so when I go down to breakfast. With 5 minutes to spare, I decide to test a suspicion that has been growing in my mind. In the village’s only supermarket where, incidentally, an entire wall is given over to hair products of every sort, I ask the clerk straight out: “Do you stock any fresh fruit?” ”Well, no.” “Is there anywhere in Fließ I can buy an apple?” “Eh, no.” So, I was right; Fließ is a fruit-free zone, at least at this time of year. I had wondered; I hadn’t once seen anything that resembled fruit- fresh or tinned – at breakfast and was missing it sorely. The prospect of a 15 minute drive to Landeck to buy fruit seems ludicrous. There is nothing for it; I will have to make up the deficit with every mushy pea and cucumber put on my plate. Perhaps the Tiroleans have the same relationship with fruit that we Scots have with vegetables; we serve chips cold the day after they were deep-fried and call them “salad…”

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Niall Benvie - Fliess, Austria 05

Day 5. 6^th July.

1000. It’s a little hard to explain to the owner of the guest house that Ernst had got permission from her husband the previous evening to put boxes of moths in their walk-in fridge overnight. Some things are beyond sign language. So I simply lead her through the kitchen and retrieve the stash. I think she tries not to look surprised.

I’ve never cooled insects before, not least because I can’t be sure I am orientating them correctly if I try to stage a shot. The white set gets round this problem as there is nothing for them to perch on. But within 10 minutes of being loaded into my oven-cum-hire car, the moths are wide awake and remain on set, in most cases, for less than 5 minutes.

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