July 29, 2013
Puffin at Borgarfjörður, Diver, and Iceberg at Jökulsárlón, Iceland

On our last morning at the puffin cliffs at Borgarfjörður, I focussed on photographing the Atlantic Puffins as they returned to their nests. I hand-held the 70-200 with 1.4x and the effective 280mm focal length was perfect as they were just about to land. I was quite surprised that the auto-focus of the Canon EF 70-200mm f2.8 L IS II USM was so much slower than the EF 600mm f4 L IS II USM that I had been using for flight shots the day before. However, the 70-200 almost always locked onto the subject while the 600 IS II frequently locked onto the ocean behind the subject.

On our way from Borgarfjörður to Egilsstaðir, we stopped to photograph this red-throated diver, or loon, in a long narrow pond next to the road. After a short time, the diver settled down and we were able to get some nice shots of her and her chicks. Shortly before we left, she started to nap, a sure indication that she was comfortable with us nearby.

Jökulsárlón is a large glacial lagoon at the head of the Breiðamerkurjökull (glacier) that's part of the Vatnajökull (ice field) in southeastern Iceland. The lagoon is filled with icebergs that have calved from Breiðamerkurjökull (glacier), and some of the icebergs make their way out to the Atlantic Ocean and become stranded on the black sand beach near the entrance to the lagoon. I photographed this iceberg early one morning after hints of color on the high clouds started to fade and a thicker cloud layer moved in. To turn the lemons into lemonade, I used a Lee Big Stopper, 10-stop ND filter, to lengthen the exposure to 4.5 minutes and turned the rather uninteresting sky into something more dramatic.