So I just got back from Iceland. It was a photography trip and I shot a whole bunch of stuff, including fashion, the northern lights and some general landscapes. What gear to take was an issue, as I had some severe weight/baggage restrictions to contend with. In the end I took the following..
- Fuji X-T1
- Fuji x100s
- 16mm 1.4
- 90mm f2
- 56mm 1.2
- One Cactus speedlight and transceiver
- Tripod
This mostly worked very well, and I was really glad to have weather sealed lenses and the weather sealed X-T1 on some days. I was travelling with a few other photographers and their lack of weather sealed gear meant they were sitting in the car while I was out shooting. The gear took a bit of a battering on this trip but came out fine the other end. If I were to choose again I’d also have found a way to take the big zoom, the 50-140 2.8, there were numerous occasions where its reach and compression would have been awesome. As it was, I managed fine and the 90mm did a great job as my long lens.
I’ll focus on the fashion shots in this article.
This was shot on the 16mm 1.4. One of the reasons I love this lens is for epic wide angle fashion shots. It was freezing cold on this beach, and we had a number of other people trying to shoot at the same time ( including two French guys shooting a rap music video in the cockpit! ). We shot this just after sunrise so there was a strong backlight, I used the flash to balance out the light. Here is a behind the scenes shot..( thanks to my assistant, Hoff, who was travelling with our group ). I shot these at f11, as I didn’t care if the background was in focus ( the background was awesome, so why not have it in focus ), iso 200, 1/180 shutter speed. Also, I didn’t have an appropriate ND filter to shoot any wider, but I was perfectly happy with f11 here. The flash unit was a Cactus RF60, which I love as it is simple and reliable.
Next, I switched around to the other side and tried to get a totally different perspective. Almost everyone shoots this plane with a wide angle, so I thought I would try the 90mm f2 ( 137mm in DSLR terms ). I wanted to get the blue sky and mountains in the background, and I had a model available with a bright red dress which I thought would offset the muted tones of the plane nicely. Here is the result..
When I looked at this in the camera I thought it was not that good, as the model was so small in the image. But when I got round to actually processing it, I really grew to love this image, as its so different from anything I’ve seen at this site before. It just shows how switching lenses and moving away from a subject can totally change things. This was shot at f2, 1/6000s of a second on the 90mm prime. I’m really pleased the electronic shutter in the Fuji made this so easy, otherwise I’d have needed an ND filter, as it was so bright. I’ll post some more fashion from Iceland later in the week.