beyond the landscape: turning nature into fine art

The rivers in Iceland look like veins flowing through the landscape

The first time I saw photos of the rivers in Iceland when shot from an aerial perspective it changed the way I viewed landscapes, the world actually. I didn't know what I was looking at. Was it something large? Was it something tiny? No idea, but it was captivating, and I couldn't look away.

I started digging into how these images were made. At the time, there weren’t many people doing it. Eventually I learned they were shot from small aircraft. Through Instagram, I connected with a pilot who specialized in flying photographers over the Icelandic coast, and before long, I had booked a flight.

Not long after, I found myself sitting in a small Cessna at the end of a runway in Reykjavík. The plane looked almost out of place—like it didn’t belong on a runway built for something much larger. The pilot revved the engine and launched the two of us into the sky.

At first it was just an aerial view of Reykjavik, then suburbs, and eventually an empty landscape, but no rivers. The pilot turned south and headed towards the coast, and then the river came into view. When we got directly overhead, the pilot slower the plane down, turned it on its side a little, and with a grin on his face that said "how 'bout that" he told me to open the window and start shooting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8p-09truT4

Here's a glimpse of what it was like to get there

not the most comfortable way to work

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It looked like ink—millions of gallons of it—tracing its way across the land. Not just one color, but multiple tones flowing alongside each other, somehow never fully mixing. Then the patterns emerged. Textures. Lines. Shapes that felt deliberate, almost designed. But they weren’t.

We circled over the river for I don't know how long, but long enough for me to take hundreds of photos. The pilot asked if I was ready to move on, and I said yet. Flying along the coastline another river came into view, and this once was totally different than the first one. This next river was like thousands of intricate veins interwoven into the earth. It was like the river was the land's vasculature, and the water was pulsing through on its was to the ocean.

something closer to a drawing than a photograph

The next thing I did was pretty meta. Even though I was in an airplane, I was still in range of cell phone towers on the ground. I pulled up Google earth and zoomed in on the area we were flying and looked for other rivers. I showed the pilot one that looked interesting, and he pointed the Cesna in that river's direction. The next river was just as unique as the previous ones. Different colors and different patterns. Circling over the river I was taking photos fast and furiously. I had two cameras, each with a different focal length to get different perspectives of the art that was flowing on the earth thousands of feet below me, and trying to capture something that didn't seem real.

if you look close you can see the shadow of the plane

After about 4 hours flying around, we returned to Reykjavik. I dropped off my camera, and went to have to dinner and try to process what I had just witnessed. Those rivers weren’t just rivers. They were compositions. The result of countless variables—glacial melt, sediment, minerals, rainfall, tides—all working together in ways that can’t be predicted or repeated. The water carries the pigment. The land shapes the form. And for a brief moment, everything aligns. From above, the landscape stops being a place. It becomes something else. Something closer to a painting. Something you don’t need to understand to feel.