Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Welcome to my new photo blog! With recent changes on various social media sites, some not so positive, I decided to use MattConti.com as main place where I will post my photos and tell short stories with them. Each image brings me back to that moment and I want to take you there too. Some posts will have new and current images, but I also want to highlight some past travel and feature photos that I have been working on.

For the first post on this new blog, it only makes sense to feature my "photo of the year." I was honored this image took 1st Place as the 2018 Overall Projected Image of the Year, voted by my peers at the Boston Camera Club.   

This gorgeous cove is at the entrance of the Húnaflói bay on Skagi Peninsula in Northern Iceland. The Kálfshamars Lighthouse was completed in 1940 with its square cylindrical design. I visited Iceland in March 2018 on a Muench Workshop with photographers/guides Kevin Pepper and Skarpi Thrainsson who I thank for the inspiration and for taking us off-road to this remote location. It was a time of year when the northern part of the country is thawing and still desolate with few visitors. Much of the snow had melted though you can still see some patches on the ground.

Upon arrival in the afternoon, this was a fun place to wander around and I remember falling asleep for a few hours not sure if the clouds would lift. Fortunately, the clouds opened just enough for the sun to peek through providing a dramatic and colorful scene.

The photo is a stitched panorama of two 24mm frames at f/16, ISO100 with a 1 second exposure on a Sony a7riii camera. A graduated neutral density filter helped keep the highlights from blowing out too much. Post processing in Lightroom was mainly to brighten up the foreground and the lighthouse.

The positive response to this image was very encouraging but this is actually not my favorite image from the Iceland trip. I still have hundreds to process, some of which are already posted in my Iceland gallery. Look for more in upcoming blog posts.

Okay, thanks again for checking out the new blog. And yes, it is feast season in Boston's North End so I will feature those images in the next blog post. Stay tuned for those and a few surprises too!