Date
24. Aug 202624. Aug 26
Reading time
3 min
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Check out Blanche’s camera roll.
Here’s the thing about photography in Iceland: you don’t need to be good at it. You just need to show up. Book your flight to Iceland and let the landscapes do the work.
Blanche, our really bad photographer, spent 10 days traveling 2,500km (over 1,500 miles) through Iceland, taking 5,484 photographs – including 61 with accidental fingers in the frame.
The results you’re seeing are as close to Blanche’s experience as it gets. And entirely hers. That’s what the really bad photographer project is all about. It’s part experiment, part reassurance, and part celebration of something we could all use a little more of: reality as it is.
Come and meet Blanche in London in September, and see what happened when a really bad photographer was let loose in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Exhibition opening hours
Friday 11 September: 2pm-8pm
Saturday 12 September: 1pm- 9pm
Exhibition Talk: Iceland by the World’s Worst Photographer
Saturday 12 September: 5pm-6pm
Meet Blanche Mortemard and hear the story behind the experiment.
The exhibition is free and open to all. The Saturday talk is ticketed – get your free ticket for the talk here.
(Stay tuned for future dates, as we plan to take the exhibition to a handful of cities in Europe and North America.)
We wanted to prove that even the worst photographer can take great photos of Iceland. It wouldn’t be much of a bad photographer experiment if we then “fixed” all the photos. So we want to be clear: these are real photos taken by the really bad photographer.
Before we explain anything, here are a couple of Blanche’s RAW files.
The first image in the gallery is the file recorded by Blanche’s camera. No AI. No generative fill. No objects added, removed, or moved around. Just the original captures, straight from the camera. (Attention photography boffins: if you want to see the original RAW files – all 41MB and 73MB of them – we invite you to download them here.)
Swipe to see the second image in the gallery – the minimally processed and converted RAW file, used on Icelandair billboards around the world.
So, why edit it at all?
Because RAW files are not finished images. They contain unprocessed data captured from the camera, which needs to be rendered before it can be viewed or printed. White balance, exposure, and color all need a little interpretation to bring the photograph closer to what we actually see. Without it, the camera can make the world look quite different from real life.
Doing so, we followed the World Press Photo editing rules: photographs can be processed, but the content of the image should remain unchanged, and color, contrast, and other adjustments should not misrepresent what was captured.
No dramatic skies. No perfect turquoise water. No removing that stray person Blanche didn’t notice. And certainly, no rescuing her composition.
Each day of Blanche’s travels around Iceland, we posted a wrap-up with videos and photos on our diary of a really bad photographer. Check it out – and maybe you’ll notice the development in Blanche’s approach to photography!
