Iceland Vatnajökull Ice Cave — Blue Crystal Light
258.13 $
Inside a natural ice cave beneath Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland — the ice ceiling 5 metres overhead glowing in translucent electric blue, ice crystal formations visible in the cave walls, the cave entrance a distant white oval.
Description
The natural ice caves that form seasonally beneath Vatnajökull and its outlet glaciers — available to guided visits from November to March when stable cold temperatures maintain the caves — produce some of the most visually extraordinary photography achievable at ground level: the compacted glacier ice, under several hundred metres of glacier weight above, is almost entirely free of air bubbles and transmits ambient light through its crystal structure as deep electric blue. This image was made in a cave formed at the base of the Breiðamerkurjökull outlet glacier, the ceiling 5 metres overhead glowing in the characteristic translucent blue that results from the combination of ice density and filtered daylight from the surface. The cave’s mouth is visible in the background as a white oval of direct daylight, its brightness contrasting with the blue of the interior. Shot on a 14mm ultra-wide at f/8 and ISO 3200 with the available daylight transmission through the ice as the sole light source.
