Greenland Photo Workshop Begins – August 27th – September 6th

It’s been a busy summer for workshops. We completed a successful Iceland workshop only a few weeks ago, and now I’m heading to Greenland. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I love the polar regions. Antarctica is one of my favorite places on the planet. I have been making Antarctica trips on a yearly basis since 2005. Over the last few years, we have also been exploring farther north.

Iceland has been one of our favorite locations, and it’s not unusual for me to do two or more workshops there a year. However, lots of things have changed there. Tourism in Iceland has become so successful that it has gotten very crowded. We are taking 2018 off from offering an Iceland workshop. Instead, we will head to Svalbard. More information on this trip is coming in the next few weeks. Svalbard is an incredible place and offers the chance to photograph polar bears. Throw in some incredible landscapes, and, as a photographer, you can’t help but come home with great images.

Last year, Chris Sanderson and I visited Greenland and prospected it as a new location for doing a workshop. We didn’t know what to expect. What we saw and photographed made us regret that we hadn’t gone to Greenland sooner. Below is a short video of what I call The Immensity of Greenland.

The Immensity of Greenland

After such a fine trip, we decided that this is a location we’d have to offer workshops to. So, I partnered with my friend Art Wolfe, and we chartered the Sea Endeavor for our first workshop trip to Greenland. The details of this workshop can be found on our Rockhopper Workshops page.

We will be departing from Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway. We will cross the Atlantic, hit the east coast of Greenland, and then work our way to Scoresby Sound. You could spend months in Scoresby Sound. It’s one of the world’s largest network of fjords and glaciers.

We’ll be seeing some amazing sites: walls of rock rising thousand of feet straight into the air, large glaciers and icebergs the likes of which are hard to imagine. We’ll be sailing into ice and making landings every day to explore the land and shore. We’ll also visit the village of Ittoqqortoormiit. It’s a small community of 500 inhabitants. We’ll do our best to imagine life in this remote part of the world.

For this trip, I have packed up a Sony kit full of cameras and lenses. I’ll be trying out a new pack by Tamrac, the Anvil 27. In it, I’ll be carrying a Sony a7rII, a9, and four lenses. For wide-angle work, I’ll have a 12-24mm G lens. I’ll be using the 16-35mm GM, 24-70mm GM, 70-200mm GM, and 100-400mm GM G Master lenses.

I am also bringing the Sony a6500 to do some video work. The a6500 is a great little camera, and if I put the 100-400mm lens on it, I’ll have an equivalent full-frame reach of 600mm with a 24mp sensor with IS (just in case I need the reach).

Video of the Gear I’m Taking

Our trip begins on the 27th of August and ends with a flight to Reykjavik on September 6. It promises to be a great trip. Many of the attendees have been on our workshops before. It’s always great to shoot with old friends as well as making new friends with those who haven’t been with us before.

We still have room on our February 2018 Antarctica South of the Circle trip. We will be going south of the Antarctica Polar Circle to explore some beautiful locations. This is a rare trip, and we will be going where few ever venture. Check it out, and join us if you can.

I’ll post a follow-up report on my return. In the meantime, the everyday business aspects of Luminous-Landscape will be handled by Debra and Chris as I’ll be completely off the grid.

Kevin Raber
August 2017