Photographer Jan Erik Waider is known for his exploration of Iceland’s magnificent landscape. From incredible icebergs to mysterious waterways, Waider brings out the best of his subjects. In his newest exploration of Iceland, he only builds on his experience to produce a fresh look at the country’s glacial rivers.

According to Waider, Iceland’s winding waterways are called “braided river systems” due to the intricate patterns that they produce. The photographer’s Glacier River Blues is a look at the abstract patterns created by these waterways. At first glance, it’s not immediately clear what we’re looking at. The rivers almost appear as inky markings along a canvas. But as we learn more about Iceland’s rivers, their pathways become clear.

“Most rivers have their source at one of the numerous glaciers and flow towards the sea,” Waider tells My Modern Met. “Along the way, they transport vital nutrients for the ecosystem in the form of sediment. As the flow of the rivers declines, the sediment is deposited within the riverbed, temporarily leaving small islands of sand which cause the river channels to further divide and branch.”

Waider has been exploring these fascinating rivers using drones and small planes for several years. His expertise in seeking out compositions in abstract shapes is evident. The combination of the hypnotic forms and the rivers’ cool colors produces a tranquil atmosphere that is part of what inspires the photographer. “I find their ephemeral and dynamic nature very captivating and inspiring, and I am always fascinated by how different the rivers look,” he admits. “Sometimes, even the same river a few kilometers downstream.”

While the images are calming, there is a lot of hard work that goes into producing them. Though Waider used to use fate to guide him, he’s now moved to looking at satellite imagery to scout locations. Once he finds something interesting, the challenge is making his way there, as many locations are quite remote. He often needs to go off-road or even fly a small plane to get what he’s after. But judging from the results, all of the effort is well worth it.

Shortly, Waider will be spreading his wings and traveling to Alaska for the first time, where he’s looking forward to viewing a new glacial landscape. Follow his adventures on Instagram, and scroll down to see more aerial views of Iceland’s rivers.

Photographer Jan Erik Waider is fascinated by Iceland’s landscape.

He often takes aerial photos that follow the abstract shapes produced by Iceland’s glacier rivers.

“I find their ephemeral and dynamic nature very captivating and inspiring.”

Jan Erik Waider: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Behance

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Jan Erik Waider.

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There might be no way to enumerate photographer James Hamilton’s archive. It’s way too huge, occupying an entire storage locker in Manhattan. It spans more than four decades, during which he has photographed everything from artists and parties to war zones and celebrity homes, creating images that are shot through with a loose spontaneity. Hamilton’s photos of musicians have filled one monograph and he’s toyed with the idea of compiling his pictures from film productions. But bringing together all his work in one place? “I don’t know if I can do one book,” he told me over a Zoom call. “It’s a Pandora’s box.” 

For now, perhaps the best view we have of Hamilton’s hoard is in Uncropped, a new documentary directed by D.W. Young (The Booksellers). In tracing his storied career, the film resurfaces his indelible images with low-key narration by Hamilton himself. There’s a lot to unpack, not least for the photographer himself, who found the making of the documentary “illuminating.” 

“I found pictures that I have absolutely no memory of taking, mostly pictures I’d taken in the street,” he said. “It’s almost as if: ‘Who took that?’” 

James Hamilton, Outside a theater on 42nd Street, Times Square NYC (1978). Photo: James Hamilton.

Much of Hamilton’s career has hinged on the talismanic press pass, credentials that granted him access behind the curtain of New York’s arts and cultural scene. His first was faked, though: in 1969, he mocked up a press pass to photograph performers at the Texas International Pop Festival, developed the pictures, and submitted them to music magazine Crawdaddy. Thus launched his work with a string of outlets including the Herald, New York Observer, Harper’s Bazaar, and Village Voice from the 1970s through the 2000s. 

As captured in the film, Hamilton’s staff positions at these publications coincided with the heyday of print journalism. These magazines, he told me, were often generous with space, allowing him total creative control. “I basically almost created my own assignments in many cases,” he said. “I mean, the Observer had two pictures a week and I could do anything I wanted.” 

James Hamilton, Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine (1975). Photo: James Hamilton.

For these publications, Hamilton would photograph a slew of figures, not limited to Jack Nicholson, James Brown, Patti Smith, Candy Darling, and Andy Warhol. In the documentary are his tales about hanging out with Duane Allman in his hotel room and attending a party where Cary Grant informed all at a table about his knife phobia. Hamilton also once showed up unannounced at Alfred Hitchcock’s St. Regis suite with a camera and press pass; the Rear Window director allowed him to fire off a few casual shots.  

“I worked very fast and I talked more than I took pictures,” he recalled of his portrait sessions. “I didn’t shoot a lot of pictures, but I would engage. That was the thing really, because otherwise, the whole experience would be boring for both of us.” 

James Hamilton, Alfred Hitchcock (1972). Photo: James Hamilton.

Hamilton’s work also took him farther afield. Beginning in the late ’70s, he photographed conflicts in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Beijing; across the U.S., he shot anti-choice protests, white supremacists, and people dying of AIDS. With writer Kathy Dobie, his partner in life and journalism, he developed pictures for stories about interracial adoption and sex workers in Brooklyn, among others. For GQ, he traveled the world photographing pinball machines, images of which made up his first book, Pinball! (1977). “I said, ‘Who wants a book about pinball?’” he told me laughingly. “It turned out a lot of people did.” 

Throughout, Hamilton maintained his practice of documenting the streets of New York—one that continues today. “I had more fun doing that kind of photography than anything because it was full of surprises,” he said, adding that he found that same element of discovery when developing his photos in the darkroom. These images, like the rest of his work, are black-and-white, dynamically composed artifacts that convey an of-the-moment kineticism, a Hamilton signature. 

James Hamilton, Protest in Tompkins Square Park, NYC (1988). Photo: James Hamilton.

The photographer’s compositions and effective use of light emerge from his passion for cinema, cultivated during his childhood in Baltimore, Maryland. “I’m always reminded of films because they were very important to me,” he said in Uncropped. After he first picked up a camera as a student at New York’s Pratt Institute, his dramatic frames owed an immediate debt to the films of the 1950s and ’60s. (In our conversation, he rued not working more in Hollywood, where he could have met the likes of Orson Welles.)

While photographing film sets, Hamilton would also find himself in front of the camera: he’s had cameos in Milos Foreman’s Taking Off (1971), George Romero’s Knightriders (1981), and notably, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Anderson, an executive producer on Uncropped, had sought out Hamilton to shoot stills on his sets, an assignment to which the photographer brought to bear his unswerving eye. “I’d rather have [him] document the movie like it’s part of the city,” the director recalled in the film, “than having someone that does things the studio is telling them to do.” 

“I was photographing everything, everything around the making of the film,” Hamilton told me about his time working with Anderson. “I treated it like a documentary—that’s the only way the job becomes fun.”

James Hamilton, Muhammed Ali (May 1977). Photo: James Hamilton.

As a younger man, Hamilton aspired to become a filmmaker until he picked up photography and found himself “content with the moment.” But in many ways, his photographic oeuvre serves up stories of its own—of New York’s cultural and social fabric, of a lifetime’s worth of work—or, as he described them in the documentary, “stories made up of moments.” They’re much like the vintage flipbooks he collects—a series of images that, when flicked through swiftly, give the semblance of movement. Hamilton, as he recounted in Uncropped, couldn’t resist swiping his first flipbook as a child.

“The irony is the first thing I ever stole was a flipbook, which combines film and stills, which is too weird,” he said. “I really do regret that I didn’t pick up a camera at that age because that’s what I believe I was born to do.” 

Uncropped is now showing at IFC Center and Sag Harbor Cinema in New York, and Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles. It will be available on digital platforms from May 7. 

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I try to capture the spirit of nature, so I can share its beauty with others. All my images are taken in natural habitats. I never move or relocate subjects for better backgrounds and tread lightly to respect the habitat I’m privileged to experience. The images are a gift to me by nature herself. I believe photographers have an important part to play in conservation, sharing the wonders of nature to a wider audience and thereby increasing awareness of the beauty we could potentially lose.

I was introduced to photography by my late father in the early ’70s; we used to develop and print our own photos in a home darkroom. We then got into macro photography. Our field kit was a macro lens on bellows with a pistol grip and cable release. Fast forward and I’ve been using Nikon cameras for many years. My first DSLR was the Nikon D70. The last was the Nikon D850, as I’ve just received a brand-new Nikon Z8. 

My interest in butterflies has become much more serious in recent years, and I’m now studying their behavior at my local nature reserve. The Z8’s high frame rate has given me the chance to photograph courtship displays and subsequently decode behavior patterns the D850 just couldn’t, consistently. Having viewed the first few images from my Z8, I have realized just how far optics have progressed.

My best shots

I’ve taken images like this before on my D850 and wanted to see how the Z8 and Z MC 105mm f/2.8 VR S would compare. I arrived just after dawn, mist hanging in the meadow and the sun peeping above the horizon. Research meant I had a pretty good idea where the silver-studded blues roosted. I eventually found a pristine female covered in dew and not obscured by heather stems. Once the sun crept above the trees behind me, it illuminated the butterfly and added golden sparkles to each of the dew drops. Perfect!

I wanted to capture the essence of a summer’s evening – a butterfly in a meadow bathed in golden sunshine. Butterflies roost in the early evening, often where they’ll catch the dawn sun. As a volunteer at my local reserve, I knew a secluded meadow with the right grass. The challenge was to find a solitary butterfly, catching the sun with its wings not fully closed and no wind. The small heath butterfly closes its wings as soon as it settles, hiding the ‘eye’ and orange color of the forewing, so I had to fire the shutter before it settled.

The butterfly in this image is smallish in size and very ‘flighty’. I wanted to capture it in its natural environment, where it often skips among the brambles. It’s also known as the hedge brown due to its propensity to frequent hedgerows. I used back-button focus with the Z8’s Pre-Release Capture so it recorded images when the shutter button was only half depressed, compensating for my slow reactions as the butterfly took off.

The six-spot burnet is a day-flying moth. It can be seen on a summer’s day, painting the sky with black lines, edged in red. I recced a few locations and waited for a calm evening with subdued lighting. I found four roosting on a thistle bloom, but as soon as I got set up they fell into the undergrowth; an effective defensive mechanism. I waited and, sure enough, they crawled back up their stems. I used Focus Peaking to ensure the nearest point was in focus and then used Focus Shift.

Dragonflies are skittish subjects. I’d watched this one for a while and realized it favored sitting on the same stick. I got myself set up and waited. It had seen me and promptly moved to another stick… I crawled towards it – silhouette below the skyline. Bingo! It landed and I got the shot.

My macro insect photography tips

• Get to know your subject. Learn where they roost, which flowers they visit and how they fly. The latter is particularly important when capturing insects in flight. Predicting the flight path can make or break an image.
• Use a fast shutter speed. When you photograph insects in flight, ideally use 1/8,000 sec. This will freeze your subject’s beating wing movements.
• Know the best time to go out. Insects are more dormant late in the evening or early in the morning. The latter is preferred, as dew will often settle on potential subjects, especially if there has been rain overnight.

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“Look!” will open April 27 at The Children’s Museum of the Upstate in Greenville.

The exhibit features photos taken by various photographers from across the state and will be on display at 300 College St. through June 14.

“We’re honored to host the Look! exhibit in partnership with Family Connection of South Carolina. This collaboration reflects TCMU’s dedication to inclusivity and accessibility and introduces this meaningful collection to visitors from across the Upstate,” said Lauren Luneckas, TCMU’s CEO. “Through these photographs, we aim to promote understanding and celebrate the inspiring stories of children and families facing disabilities or chronic health conditions.”

Access to the exhibit is included with museum admission. Tickets are free for TCMU members and children under 1 year old; $10 per educator, military member or senior; $13 per South Carolina resident and $19 for general admission. For more information, visit tcmupstate.org.