aurora borealis | sólheimasandur | island 2016 by Dennis Wehrmann

This photograph was shot on Iceland and shows the wreck of a Douglas Super DC-3 in the “desert” Sólheimasandur. The aircraft was forced to an emergency landing due to a frozen carburetor and went down only a couple of hundred meters behind the coastline. Since that night the Douglas is lying in the bleak landscape. We decided to visit this airplane at night as the aurora borealis forecast was not too bad. However we didn`t exactly knew from which direction the aurora would appear and therefore the aircraft seemed to be the perfect location for rotation. Additionally the aircraft is lying in the middle of nowhere and can only be reached on foot after a walk of appr 5km. Good and bad news for us! Good as we could expect to be the only visitors at the location and bad because of the long walk in the cold, wind and fully equiped… We were happy to walk this distance with the prospect of a quite location. Unfortunately there were already appr 10 visitors when we arrived, shouting and jumping on the leftovers of the wings. These guys kept us busy for nearly 2 hours until we were finally on our own. We worked hard for more than one additional hour to shot at least one photograph. In the end everbody was happy, exhausted, frozen and hauled our bodies and cameras back on the 5 km walk to our car. 5 hours for one single shot. http://flic.kr/p/Qh3i3B