For photographers, the "golden hour" is magic.
It's the time just after the sun rises and right before the sun sets when the landscape turns a soft red.
Mission resident Mark Sippola saw it for five hours a day when he travelled with three other Lower Mainland photogs to Iceland, in early September of 2013.
It was their first trip to the northern country and they were in disbelief. "All day long - everywhere we went - we had beautiful light," Sippola recalled. "The sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows."
As a group, known as the BOB (Back of the Bus) Photography Collective, the foursome visited scenic locations on the island: waterfalls, volcanos, glaciers, rivers, for example.
And, at night, they compared their images and realized they captured different perspectives of the same place - be it higher or lower, with different angles or lenses.
Sippola, a businessman whose love for photography is quickly turning into "a second career," primarily documents land- and seascapes on his Nikon camera (the others, Lesley MacGregor, Jan Sampson and Francesc Izquierdo are Canon fans)."I'm colour blind. I made a choice to just do everything in black and white. I don't trust my colour interpretation," Sippola said.
On Thursday night, the BOB Photography Collective will open its inaugural show, titled Exploring Iceland, in the Atrium Gallery at Place des Arts. Sippola hopes viewers will take notice of the disparate techniques of the four shutterbugs: his contrast and light; MacGregor's bare essentials; Sampson's movement and details; and Izquierdo's sweeping arenas.
The reception for Exploring Iceland is Jan. 8 at 7 p.m. Also opening on Thursday night is Visible Form, a multiple media show by My Artist's Corner, and Monokuro, an oil on canvas grissaille by Moira Carroll. The exhibits run until Feb. 7 at Place des Arts (1120 Brunette Ave., Coquitlam).
@jwarrenTC
