what is a bucket shot? i first heard this term used by one of the few photographers i'm a fan of, peter mckinnon. a bucket shot is like a bucket list but for photographers - it's a picture you want to take before you die. i've started making my own bucket shot list since hearing this term, and the sólheimasandur plane wreck was at the top of my list. here's how it happened.
iceland is my favorite place in the world, the entire country is gorgeous; snow capped mountains and extravagant waterfalls literally everywhere you look, grass covered landscapes spanning for miles, it's like a scene straight out of lord of the rings. but the reynisfjara and sólheimasandur beaches are absolutely unreal on their own. there is a strange calming, ominous feel when you're on them. even with tourists around, it feels dead silent save the wind and ocean waves. a beach with black sand (which is actually lava rock) is the only type of beach i like. it's not for swimming or tanning, its meant to take in. i'll go into detail on sólheimasandur a little later on.
in 2018, after waiting and researching for years, i finally got to go with my buddy ryan. *ryan has become my go to person for travel and will probably come up in multiple 'behind the viewfinder' articles in the future.* ryan moved out to seattle after we graduated college in 2016 but we've always kept in touch and continued our solid relationship since.
we landed in iceland at around 7 am local time (so that's 4 am EST). it was a 5.5 hour red-eye flight filled with zero sleep due to a broken seat back and built up excitement and angst...i was feeling rough to say the least. adrenaline kept me going, cause my brain sure as hell didn't. i ate a half-assed breakfast, flirted with the rent-a-car agent because i flirt with literally everybody (she gave me a children's coloring book for my efforts), and we drove 45 minutes from the airport to reykjavik.
now, the one thing i would say that sucks about iceland is the driving. EVERYTHING is far away from each other. on average, we must've drove 6 hours a day moving from one location to the next and back to the hotel, just so i could capture everything i possibly could before we left.
at this point, it's about 9 am. we check into our hotel and i'm wide awake from the second wave. years of waiting, and i was finally on the same landmass as the bucket shot. ryan, however, was shot. he slept for a little as i laid down staring at the clock the entire time. i was amped up. i had so many places i wanted to see and zero patience. i woke ryan up with a "bruh...i gotta go shoot something" and we were off.
now, the one thing i would say that sucks about iceland is the driving. EVERYTHING is far away from each other. on average, we must've drove 6 hours a day moving from one location to the next and back to the hotel, just so i could capture everything i possibly could before we left.
at this point, it's about 9 am. we check into our hotel and i'm wide awake from the second wave. years of waiting, and i was finally on the same landmass as the bucket shot. ryan, however, was shot. he slept for a little as i laid down staring at the clock the entire time. i was amped up. i had so many places i wanted to see and zero patience. i woke ryan up with a "bruh...i gotta go shoot something" and we were off.
the long car rides were filled with conversations only we could have. both of us having a mechanical engineering background and a passion for music...i mean i don't know how much you wanna hear about the future of self driving cars, machine learning and neural networks, and how important it is for a drummer to understand a score, sit in the pocket, and setup all the ebbs and flows of an RnB song, but that's what we talked about.
that's a lot of back story already for one picture, and for good reason. taking photos is not as easy as it looks, especially when travel/prep is involved and time is of the essence. with a 2 hour drive ahead of us to the first location, no sleep, and carrying 25 lbs worth of gear on my back, that second wave was about to be tested. *SPOILER ALERT - it failed*.
we had a plan to attack three spots that were more or less in a row from each other off the same main road. again, that doesnt mean they were close, just that they were easy to get to from one another
first was skógafoss.
me before exhaustion set in...
skógafoss is huge. at 197 ft, it's roughly about 14 stories tall in building terms. but its not steep (except for the actual falls part of it). the mountain hugging the falls is a long sloping incline. why bring that up? well, there's a staircase on said incline. after shooting from the ground level for about 20 minutes,i had a "yolo" moment. we were definitely climbing that staircase. was it worth it? ...kinda, i got one decent shot from it.
stairs of death
...ok i lied, i have one more complaint about iceland. stairs. every staircase near a tourist attraction is made of metal grating. metal grating, in case you didn't know, is smooth. smooth metal when wet is very slippery. waterfalls are made of (you guessed it) water and produce mist. mist makes things wet.
see where i'm going with this?
there are also terrible "handrails." literally loose chain link rope looped between metal posts. so if you fall, you are legit falling for a long time. i (stupidly) was wearing leather converses, so grip was near non existent. so lets recap. no sleep, adrenaline gone, 25 lbs of gear, slippery staircase, 14 stories on a very long incline. it gets worse, don't worry.
with completely destroyed legs, we embarked toward the bucket shot location, our second of the three spots. that's when nervousness started to set in.
i always get nervous before shoots. i put a lot of pressure on myself and there are so many things could go wrong. this shoot being in a country thousands of miles away from my home meant i couldn't just go back and retake the picture later. so if i took the shot over exposed, welp...fuck me i guess. aperture to small? sucks to suck. battery dies? rookie mistake.
at this point, i'm mentally going through everything in my head: camera settings, angle, lens choice. everything.
at this point, i'm mentally going through everything in my head: camera settings, angle, lens choice. everything.
you know what i didn't think through? this:
a nearly 2.5 mile walk from the parking lot to the actual plane wreck.
with no sleep, 25lbs of gear...you get the point.
i think my actual quote when i realized this was "fuuuucccckkkkkkk......"
that walk was miserable. there was a storm moving across the coast so the winds were strong and cold (it was in the upper forties fahrenheit terms). i started getting pins and needles in my feet and my thighs were at the point of explosion. i was moving forward solely from momentum and gravity, not will power. on top of all that, there was the crowd of tourists.
look. i hate people. people ruin everything. plans, life, relationships, and especially photoshoots. there's a reason why i no longer allow 'third party' people to tag along for photoshoots anymore unless i trust that person (to which, ryan is the only person i trust). that reason is: people are people. when i have a vision on a shoot, i don't want outside suggestions, commentary, 'help', or distractions. i want the model / subject and myself. that's it.
people suck.
and, of course, the people were ALL OVER that plane. inside it, around it, on top of it. i was heartbroken. i mean don't get me wrong, i knew people would be there. the plane wreck is a very popular tourist attraction. but immediately, i was filled with doubt on whether i would be able to get this shot that i have been dreaming of for years.
people suck.
and, of course, the people were ALL OVER that plane. inside it, around it, on top of it. i was heartbroken. i mean don't get me wrong, i knew people would be there. the plane wreck is a very popular tourist attraction. but immediately, i was filled with doubt on whether i would be able to get this shot that i have been dreaming of for years.
but then, like a prayer answered by god, everything i wanted and needed to happen happened.
it started to drizzle; extremely light, but enough to turn the entire sky a greyish white. the wind died down considerably, lessening the struggle of trying to frame the shot with sand flying in your face and frostbitten fingers. and the people started backing away from the plane too. that's probably one of the best perks of being a photographer - when people see you pull out a huge camera and lens from your backpack compared to their shitty smartphone cameras (yes, smartphone cameras are shitty, that's a rant for another day), they (most times) back away. its like they realize "oh wait...this dude is serious right now" and their shitty IG vacation selfie no longer seems relevant.
...of course, not everyone moved, which brings me back to hating people, but i digress.
i also want to clear up a common misconception about lighting that people have with photography.
clear blue skies are not always best. the sun is very harsh and casts way too much light on a subject, creating sharp shadows and contrast. if i'm shooting on a clear day, i always try to move my model to an area that has some blockage from the sun so that the lighting is still good but is no where near as powerful. cloudy skies, however, are perfect. clouds offer natural diffusion to even out the light from the sun, lighting the subject perfectly. again, this is a case by case scenario and also the photographer's preference. i personally want moody, so give me the clouds.
i also want to clear up a common misconception about lighting that people have with photography.
clear blue skies are not always best. the sun is very harsh and casts way too much light on a subject, creating sharp shadows and contrast. if i'm shooting on a clear day, i always try to move my model to an area that has some blockage from the sun so that the lighting is still good but is no where near as powerful. cloudy skies, however, are perfect. clouds offer natural diffusion to even out the light from the sun, lighting the subject perfectly. again, this is a case by case scenario and also the photographer's preference. i personally want moody, so give me the clouds.
RAW shot: Canon 5D MKIII, Canon EF24-70mm f/2.8L II USM
ƒ/2.8 24.0 mm 1/400 sec ISO 100
ok, so a couple thoughts on the RAW shot. first off, i have no idea for the life of me why i shot on an angle rather than keeping the horizon line straight. i'll bring this up later because my OCD gnawed at my brain during editing for this. but yea, that was stupid.
the next thing i saw straight away was the people in the shot: the couple behind the plane, the leg under the destroyed cockpit, and then the leg off to the right side. obviously all had to be photoshopped out. while you would probably think "why not just wait a little longer until all of the people moved out of the way?" it really wasn't possible. there were 4 people in this picture, probably 13 people behind me, one in the plane itself, and more walking towards us on that 2.5 mile death walk. there was no "perfect" time to shoot this in regards to not having people present.
photoshop is a very touchy subject for photographers. some are vehemently against any use of it, saying that the edit is no longer the image you captured and you are ruining the intent of what a photograph represents. others go absolutely crazy with it, adding textures and backgrounds that can make a shot look like its from another world. my use case for photoshop is a little more specific. aside from how i use it with portraiture, 90% of the time its used to to remove things. the things i remove fall into 2 categories.
1) if something is distracting from the main subject of the image
2) if something COULD have at some point in time not been in the frame
and with that, i get to play god for a bit and just start erasing people from existence.
let's touch back on me screwing up and shooting the horizon on a slant. to the normal person, this really isn't that big of a deal. just rotate the image and it's straight. done.
here's the issue: simply rotating the image also crops the image, and that would throw off the ratio between the background and the subject; the plane would appear much larger and smother the image. the whole intent of the photo was to have a balance of the plane with the vast empty landscape that surrounds it. the less background involved, the less ominous the scene becomes. in comes photoshop. i actually fixed this the hard way (i edited the picture initially with a punched in plane, then went back on said edit to expand the beach landscape) but within photoshop there is the 'content aware' feature. content aware may straight up be my favorite technological advancement ever. basically, you select an area (be it blank or part of the photo) and tell photoshop "yo, fix this" and it does. i can't really explain how it works (i mean i kinda can, but this is not the place to do that) but it's awesome. so how i fixed it was i extended the crop of the photo in post (which then showed transparent pixels) and then had photoshop fill in those spots with sky or black sand. what i SHOULD have done was just check off the "content aware fill" box in the crop tool area and have it do everything in one shot. whoops.
i mean...it worked either way, so whatever.
the bucket shot
the post-processing of this image was almost more important than the shot itself, as this edit would later be the basis of what defines my editing style today: clipping the whites and blacks. this technique takes out the details in the whites and blacks of the image but leaves you with a grey filmy look on white tones and a very deep rich tone in the blacks. i do this with lightroom's tone curve and make these adjustments in a gradual fashion, adding a nice fade on top of the image. in addition to that, the midtones tend to pop more and make subjects look bold against the faded feel.
i'll be the first to admit, the bucket shot is by no means extravagant. google image search "peter mckinnon bucket shot" and you'll see what an incredible image that is compared to this one.
and yet...that was the entire point.
in a country full of these spectacular natural creations like waterfalls, mountains, and ice formations, i wanted to shoot a plane crash. in all of my research of the plane wreck, there wasn't a single photo of it that i liked. and that's not saying they are bad photos, but their vibe wasn't what i envisioned. others are super punchy and contrasty, some over exposed to show the details, or underexposed to try to add mystery. they all tried to be that 'extravagant' shot.
but what i envisioned was different:
think of a movie trailer with some 'explosions in the sky' music in the background. the screen is black, when suddenly you hear that cliché lone piano note and underlying low tone and the first visuals fly onto the screen. that first visual is so important to defining the rest of that trailers vibe and purpose. you need that one image that defines a deeper feeling than just "dark". i wanted a feeling of abandonment, of emptiness, of silence. i wanted an "end of days" vibe that didn't feel like things were collapsing, but more like the end of the world was already here and irreversible. i wanted my shot to have two simultaneous reactions of "holy shit..." one being the immediate reaction to seeing the crash, and the next being a moment of feeling complete isolation from life. alone.
think of a movie trailer with some 'explosions in the sky' music in the background. the screen is black, when suddenly you hear that cliché lone piano note and underlying low tone and the first visuals fly onto the screen. that first visual is so important to defining the rest of that trailers vibe and purpose. you need that one image that defines a deeper feeling than just "dark". i wanted a feeling of abandonment, of emptiness, of silence. i wanted an "end of days" vibe that didn't feel like things were collapsing, but more like the end of the world was already here and irreversible. i wanted my shot to have two simultaneous reactions of "holy shit..." one being the immediate reaction to seeing the crash, and the next being a moment of feeling complete isolation from life. alone.
i don't know how this image would have come out should any of the backstory have changed. if i had more energy, i may have been more ambitious with editing. if we went any earlier or later, the storm would not have hit at the perfect time. if it didn't start raining, the cloud formation would have been completely different and thrown off the entire vibe i wanted. this is why what happens behind that viewfinder is so important. a photo is not defined by that split second in time when it's captured. it's defined by the story that brought you to press the shutter button.
