Greenland From Above

Following up on Denise's blog about our incredible trip this past summer to Greenland, I wanted to write about drone photography during this trip.

There are considerable limits on the amount of gear you can take to Greenland.  This starts with the weight limits imposed by the airline, then of course, space on the boat is quite limited as well.  Thankfully the DJI Mavic Pro is both small and lightweight.

According to our boat crew, about 50% of the people who bring a drone on this trip end up loosing or crashing their drone.   Considering this was the trip of a lifetime, I decided to give flight a try on our first morning, but it was not meant to be.  The drone had an internal calibration error and required a calibration process that required no movement or vibration.   So I had to wait until we went ashore that evening to run the calibration routine.

The next morning we woke up at the Iceberg Graveyard.  This is an area where the currents take the icebergs but there is nowhere for them to escape.  The shot above was taken at the Iceberg Graveyard around 4:00am just prior to sunrise.  Our ship was anchored a considerable distance away, and we took Zodiacs into this lagoon area and shot from land.  It was also my favorite spot for using the Mavic and luckily we spent two mornings in this area and were able to return to this area the next morning. 

I did try one flight a couple of days later from the boat.  We were near a glacier and the boat was still but not anchored.   Upon return to the boat the drone ended up doing a little bit of a controlled crash upon landing.  I chipped a propeller but otherwise the drone was undamaged.

In addition to the minor crash I mentioned,  I also had some times where the Mavic would lose GPS and then inflight control and stability became a bit more erratic.  However,  the more experienced you become as a pilot the easier these incidents are to handle.

I'm doing a lecture on Drone Photography for our meetup group on March 30th.  Click here for more info.

Good Morning Greenland

Our last blog featured a massive iceberg that we shot around midnight on the start of our Greenland Adventure.  After shooting that massive chunk of ice we retired to our bunks for the night.   The boat crew worked in 3 hour shifts while we slept so we would arrive at the Sun Glacier the next morning.

The really cool thing about being on a boat was shooting this massive glacier within a few minutes of waking up in the morning.    The Sun Glacier was such an amazing sight, the icecap that covers much of Greenland just rolled over the edge of this mountain range into the sea.   We watched the glacier calving several times.  Often there was a waterfall that would occur after the initial calving and the waterfall would sometimes run for just a few minutes and in other places the waterfalls were constant.

Little did we know every day for the next week would be an incredible visual treat.

Number One

This is what I call Iceberg Number One.   A couple of weeks ago we landed at Constable Point in Greenland for the start of what one of our participants called “one of the top 5 events in my life”.    This tour was over 2 years in planning and simply amazing!   We will be writing additional blogs and posting additional images as time goes forward, but we wanted to get an image posted here on our blog. 

Be sure to follow Don and Denise on Facebook if you don’t want to miss any of our images from this amazing trip.

Back to Number One.  Our flight from Iceland to Greenland was delayed several hours due to weather in a different area of Greenland and this caused a cascading delay in our departure from Iceland.   Once we finally got on the plane and started to taxi out to the runway, one of the plane’s engines died and we instead taxied to the maintenance hangar.   After returning to the terminal Air Iceland readied another plane and 30 minutes later we were finally in the air. 

Upon arrival in Greenland we had a 20 minute walk from the airport to the zodiacs, we transferred to the schooner Opal and after dinner started our voyage from Constable Point to the main part of Scoresby Sund.  The first thing the crew told us is that distances in Greenland are deceptive.   Number One Iceberg was visible to us on the boat almost 2 hours before we arrived.  It seemed so much closer.  We circled this beautiful hunk of ice between midnight and 1 a.m. before retiring for the night.   

If you would like to be notified when registration is open for our 2020 Greenland Tour drop us an email.