The next day we shot up to Gulfoss and the geyser basin near Geysir. Then we head back to the Ring Road by way of Reykholt and followed the river valley. Countless waterfalls and rivers from the summer melt off of glaciers backdrop Icelandic horse and sheep farms. We ended the day photographing at least 6 named waterfalls and ended at Seljalandsfoss, where we camped at the neighboring farm.

A ferry ride to the archipelago of the Westman islands was our treat the next morning. From Landeyjarhonf it is a half hour ferry ride verses at least 4 hours from the Reykjanes penisula, however check the schedule because it might only be open during the tourist season. After taking a boat tour around some of the islands, seeing the destruction of a 1970s eruption, and walking the town we caught the evening ferry back to the mainland for sunset. There we continued on the Ring Road to Vik (where we stayed the night). Vik has a couple of interesting seastacks, a great columnar basalt formation and a good vantage of a sea arch that is in the distance. Also this is a good location for puffin spotting. The birds like the flat tops of the columnar basalt to build nests ontop of.

Day 4: began with a hike to a unique waterfall, Savartifoss (southeast Iceland), which is a hanging columnar basalt formation. Then we continued up the east coast to Jokulsarlon lake. Jokulsarlon is a large glacial lake full of icebergs. It is an intensely interesting place to photograph. The icebergs are form from a recieding glacier on the west end of the lake and large multi-ton cunks calving into the lake. As the ice melts it marches to the mouth of the river that flows a couple hundred yards to the ocean. Interestingly, at the union of water the waves push some of the ice back up onto the beaches, the melting ice looks like simmering diamonds accenting the rocky beach. From there we moved into the fjord section which is where we spent the night.

Day 5: After seeing a few fjords we moved up into mountains. However we didn’t make it too far. This was the only day we had truely bad weather. The winds were gusting in the 40s and 50s and snowing to the point of whiteout, so we holed up in a farm houses guest house.

Day 6: Now we in the Northeastern part of Iceland, this might have been one of the best days. We saw amazing water falls in Detifoss and Godafoss, Myvatn lake and the toured the nearby geothermal plant, and saw humbacks out of Husavik. While I would tell everyone that visits Iceland to take a week and drive the Ring Road, if that wasn’t and option and you had the funds, take an in country charter to this area. The waterfalls range from the largest (Detifoss), in volum of water in Europe, to maybe the most beautiful (Godafoss). While we only saw Humpbacks off of Husavik, the Fjord is know to be in the migratory path of over 7 species and its peak is in June and July.

Day 7: Our last day was packed and a long drive since we lost the day to bad weather. We went up the penisula near Hvammstangi to see Hvitserkur (a sea stack) and around the tip to see seals at Illugastadir. After that we headed back to highway 1 (The Ring Road). After that we headed to Barnafoss and Haufranfossar, here is a beautiful chain of waterfalls, which are really numerous springs. Countless underground water sources whois origins are unknown burst from the cliffside and join a vibrant turquoise glacial river. After that we visited Pingvillar National Park to the Northeast of Reykjvik before heading into town to find a campsite near the airport.

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One of the most frequent questions we received from friends and family was “why Iceland?” At first, I posed the same question to my wife when she mentioned it as an option for our vacation. I imagine it is probably a combination of the name, “ICE-land,” the fact that volcanoes have recently stopped international airline travel for a number days, and the fact that the country was recently in the news for their severe financial collapse. But after only a few minutes of deeper research which consisted of Google-ing “Iceland Landscapes,” I was hooked… and my wife was trapped.

As this was a spur of the moment opportunity, we were a bit limited in our choice of season to go, but fortunately we were able to go during one of the best times of year. The last days of May and the first days of June provide countless opportunities to photograph waterfalls, wild flowers, and birds among other wild and natural experiences. Also, this time of year is near the start of the tourist season allowing us to explore the country without much of a crowd. Lastly, the amount of daylight (about 20 hrs) made it easy to cover a lot of ground and sites, not to mention that the sunsets and “Golden Hour” last for about 3 hours (instead of the 30 minutes in the lower 48), allowing for 2 or 3 locations to be photographed in one evening depending on how quickly you work and how accessible the location is off the road (generally very easy).

We flew into Iceland early in the afternoon and spent the first day walking around Reykjavik. We primarily were visiting Iceland for its natural beauty and therefore unfortunately didn’t give the city its due time. Reykjavik is supposed to have a number a great museums that do a fantastic job orienting you to the country’s heritage and its Scandinavian “Sagas” (family stories), geological story, and art. We perused the major tourist sites and for the parts that we missed, we resorted to reading almost every word of our guidebook while on the road. After a walking tour and some window shopping, we headed off to bed early to try and get adjusted to the time zone.

BY JIM WISE, STAFF WRITER

dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563

DURHAM – John Zager met a lot of regulars when he worked at Madhatter Bake Shop & Café for two years while his wife was a graduate student at Duke University. He showed them photographs he’d been taking of places around Durham, and was surprised that many longtime residents didn’t know the back story of the buildings.

Zager has self-published a collection of photos of Durham, and their back story, in “Durham In Changing Light.” Images from the book will be displayed in an exhibit at Through This Lens gallery opening today downtown, which is also his book launch.

Zager grew up in Minnesota and lived outside Seattle before moving to Durham in 2008, and moved back to Seattle a year ago. Those areas have historic buildings, he said, but when he got to Durham he felt the structures here had stories to tell. He followed Gary Kueber’s website Endangered Durham, about the history and present of Durham’s buildings. Kueber wrote the introduction to Zager’s book, referring to Durham with an adjective not often used: “beautiful.”

Zager, who lived in Croasdaile Apartments, said he was intrigued by Durham’s neighborhoods, in particular Old West Durham and Watts Hospital-Hillandale. Both are featured in the book, as well as Duke, East Durham and much of downtown. Another segment focuses on Durham’s origins and natural surroundings.

The images of Durham were taken day and night, using no flash and usually a tripod for Zager’s Canon 5D digital SLR.

“A lot of people come to Durham from outside, like the Northeast, and come to work at Duke or the Research Triangle area and see it as a beautiful place to live,” Zager said. “The history is all around you but not very apparent. There aren’t many plaques or museums,” he said.

Zager said he didn’t intend “Durham In Changing Light” as a historical guide, but rather to highlight certain places in Durham and to show why the Bull City consistently tops lists of best places to live.

Read more: The Herald-Sun – Durham s back story

http://www.heraldsun.com/view/full_story/15142815/article-Durham-s-back-story?instance=main_article

by Chris Vitiello

History has a greater, more emotional significance when one has a personal connection to it. Most often, the historical and personal overlap in a specific place. Once one has lived in a place long enough to witness change, civic and personal history have overwritten each other. One becomes a living document.

With two events this week, photographer John Zager celebrates the publication of Durham In Changing Light, a book of more than 125 recent photographs that amount to a portrait of what Durham is now and how it came to be. The book promises to be a treasure for both the coffee table and the local history shelf. Zager’s crisp, sumptuous images will prompt stories and summon memories in anyone who’s lived in Durham for any length of time.

Durham In Changing Light opens with a black-and-white image that predates the city. A lyrical shot of St. Mary’s Chapel Cemetery links Durham’s origin to the Great Indian Trading Path and the 1850s North Carolina Railroad that linked Hillsborough to Raleigh and included a train station around which the Bull City would eventually grow.

Other historic buildings and sites, such as Bennett Place, the Stagville plantation and the Duke Homestead, are represented with accompanying text by Zager. He also touches on Durham’s crucial role in the civil rights movement and the racist destruction of the Hayti district in the name of 1970s urban renewal. Images of more current cultural changes in the city, such as the rise of the farmers market and the local food movement, will have readers looking for themselves in the pictures.

Zager says the book was born from a personal project to document Durham neighborhoods.

“I decided that I really wanted to immerse myself into Durham,” says Zager over the phone from his new home in Seattle, where he and his wife moved after she finished a degree at Duke.

“I had no intention originally to do a book. I wanted to challenge myself, so I decided to go out over the course of a month and just shoot the neighborhoods and different buildings during the daytime and nighttime, just to see how it changes.”

As it turned out, Zager couldn’t put down the camera. Four obsessive months of shutter clicks passed. “I was out almost every single night. My wife Pooja was a little annoyed about that,” Zager laughs. “But it was a meaningful, exciting project for me.”

Having lived here for only two years, Zager spent enough time in Durham to become an insider while still remaining an outsider. He immediately saw the fact that the city wears its history on its sleeve.

“That impressed me as an outsider coming to the city, realizing that there’s something special going on here. Growing up in Minnesota and then spending time in Seattle, I’ve definitely been around places that have historic buildings. But there’s a lot more preserved in Durham than people realize or appreciate.”

It will be difficult for Zager’s readers to resist unfurling personal examples. For instance, on a cold November night in 2008, my daughter and I huddled beneath an inhospitable drizzle in the park at Corcoran and Main streets in downtown Durham to witness the election of the country’s first black president. A television broadcast was projected onto a huge sheet against the backdrop of the moldering green wall of the old Mr. Shoe building.

How many of us knew that we were celebrating Obama’s election within the footprint of the old Durham Woolworth’s, where black students occupied the lunch counter in 1960 just three days after the “Greensboro Four” sit-ins? Or that, a week later, Martin Luther King visited the Woolworth’s before giving his “Fill up the jails” speech at the White Rock Baptist Church?

Next to a moonlit shot of today’s crumbling green monstrosity, Zager runs down the civil rights significance of what’s now just a run-down eyesore recently heaped on Greenfire Development’s pile of shame, after the city declared the wall too unstable for people to walk within range of falling bricks.

This is exactly the kind of personal and historical reaction that Zager is hoping his photographs will provoke. “People who aren’t familiar with Durham just don’t get that picture. I’ve even met a few people who looked at the book before I printed it, who said, ‘You might want to think about taking that picture out’ and I said, ‘I don’t think I can do that.’

“I feel like it’s such an important structure that was lost, and had a lot of important history and meaning. It shows the impact that we can have, destroying our history.”

Durham In Changing Light stands against that destruction, and the living documents who see this book will likely line up behind it.

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/john-zager-captures-the-bull-citys-history-in-durham-in-changing-light/Content?oid=2634989

I have to add a large thank you to my wife for the countless hours she spent with me reviewing and editing this project and is a major reason for its successful transition from a rough draft into it’s final product.

–John Schelp, Old West Durham

An extensive complex of condos, apartments, restaurants and offices, West Village is the past and present of Durham. Once this network of brick tobacco warehouses and factories was full of bustling workers, the smell of drying tobacco, and trucks picking-up/delivering cargoes. Liggett and Myers took their first steps into the Durham tobacco industry by building two warehouses (Cobb and O’Brien) in 1898 and 1899, along Main Street. Soon after completion in 1899, Liggett and Myers was acquired by the American Tobacco Company (ATC), helping to make the ATC the largest company in the world. The Liggett and Myers Main Street campus expanded quickly while under the control of the American Tobacco Company. With similarly styled, parrallel chimneyed orange brick warehouses, to that of Brightleaf Square, the complex grew from two buildings to 12, by 1930. The booming business helped Durham to be known for the aroma of drying tobacco that wafted through the streets.

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In 1911 the United States Congress issued a Dissolution Decree which forcibly broke apart the American Tobacco Company into four smaller enterprises, a reconstitution of the Liggett Myers Tobacco Company, the creation of R.J. Reynolds Company, P. Lorillard, and a new American Tobacco Company. Shortly after the dissolution, Liggett Myers headquartered their tobacco manufacturing in Durham and did so until 2001, when it closed its Durham tobacco operations. In 2003, the buildings were sold to a development company which had a master plan to turn the buildings into a planned community. Now, Durham’s West Main Street is a cultural center, with residential neighborhoods, condos, apartments, vibrant restaurants, and other locally owned businesses. These iconic brick buildings, still leave an impression and anchor this part of town’s economy.

http://www.liggettvectorbrands.com/pages/company_info/timeline.jsp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liggett_Group

http://endangereddurham.blogspot.com/search/label/West%20Village

http://endangereddurham.blogspot.com/2010/04/cobb-and-obrien-buildings.html

Arches National Park for most people will take 1-2 full days to explore a majority of the park. However, for photographers you may want to plan 3-5 days to get the full experience. The park has a decent network of roads and very few of the popular hikes are longer than 3-4 miles roundtrip. Even the hike to Delicate Arch, is about 3 miles. (National Park Map)

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Tips for planning your trip:

• Reserve your campsite early. Arches is among the favorite parks in the USA and compared to its popularity it has very few campsites.

• Since it takes anywhere from 60-90 minutes to drive from Moab to Devil’s Garden (the deepest point of the park) it is most efficient to camp inside the park.

• Summer is hot and very crowded, late spring (May) and early fall (Oct.) are less so and a good time to visit.

Recommended Photography Equipment

Helpful Equipment includes: a wide angle lens (17mm), a graduated neutral density filter (1-2 two stops), a polarizer, a light weight tripod, and a cable release.

RECOMMENDED TIME OF DAY FOR PHOTOGRAPHY