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The water itself appears on Earth in many interesting shapes: geysers, springs, swift streams, waterfalls, glaciers and more. Each of them, depending on the surrounding environment, the way of light reflection or the physics nature of the process, demands exclusive approach from the photographer and using adequate technique so that the final shot result would be satisfactory attractive. The subject is wide so I divided it into three separated articles: geyser and hot springs, waterfalls and streams, the glacier.
Hydrodynamic Impressions - geyser and hot springs.
One of the Iceland's most known nature attractions are geysers. Actually, there are only a few active geysers in Iceland but one should know that the active geyser is quite rare phenomenon and It exists only in a few places on Earth. The most famous geyser is The Great Geysir from which word 'geyser' comes from and exists in different languages. The Great Geysir is no more active - the last eruption was noticed in 60 ties of XX century. Nowadays, the most known active geyser, called Strokkur, situated in south Iceland geothermal area, erupts with a several meter high spectacular fountain every few minutes and is the aim of many tourist trips. I'll try to reveal some photo hints and thoughts which you may find valuable in case you decide to make your own trip with a camera to the geyser some day.
Equipment and technical aspects.
Let me first focus on technical aspects of shooting this unusual water phenomenon. In Iceland I used canon EOS 40D camera with canon 50mm/1.4 USM lens, Sigma 10-22mm wide angle zoom and occasionally my fathers telephoto lens. I had the UV filter put on my lenses and additional power supply in case the dedicated one got exhausted. I used two compact flash cards SanDisk Extreme III 4GB and 8GB for my pictures. My father carried Samsung s760 point and shot camera and a Canon eos 50E full frame analog body with Canon EF28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 USM lens. The first main problem I had to face up was the dynamics of gushing water. Capturing sharp image of erupting intermittently water is not a piece of cake. The explosion appeared and disappeared immediately and initially no matter if I tried to catch a single or a series of photos -the resulting image was too soft and details on a full crop were almost lost - the autofocus of camera was unable to react intelligent enough to focus on the area I wanted. So I turned off the autofocus and adjusted focus point manually. The first crushing advantage over point'n shot camera carried by my father appeared here, though he helped himself somehow by blocking focus on some object distanced similarity to the geyser explosion area.