All photos by Tobias Friedrich. Used with Creative Commons permission.
“Just the tip of the iceberg,” so a famous saying goes, and this featured series offers a glimpse of what underneath the all the ice exactly looks like. In his hypnotic series titled Shades of Water – Ice, German underwater photographer Tobias Friedrich takes us to the frigid waters of Greenland to show us the otherworldly beauty that lies beneath the icebergs and the frozen surface. If you’re passionate about underwater photography, you’ll find this especially fascinating.
To help bring awareness to the scale of the icebergs — and what inspired the imagery behind the idiom above — Friedrich also brought freediver Anna von Boetticher into the picture. She dove in the minus three degree Celsius waters of East Greenland, deep into the surreal underwater world hidden from our sight. That’s definitely cold alright, but not as cold as the outside temperature, which Friedrich said was minus 17 degree Celsius and up to minus 27 with the windchill factor.
Friedrich captured a dramatic contrast from the white stillness of the frozen surface above, with the water taking on a hypnotic blue-green hue against the ice. The series shows Boetticher dwarfed by the massive chunks of icebergs, giving us an idea on just how much we don’t see from the surface.
There’s no doubt that a lot of work must have gone through this series, from the planning and logistics, down to the actual shoot underwater. Friedrich actually shot a short clip of the dive as well to bring us an even more comprehensive view of the project. For this, he put together aerial footage shot with a DJI Mavic Pro and underwater footage shot with a Canon 1DX Mark II in SEACAM housing.
Tobias Friedrich has a lot of impressive underwater photography projects, so make sure to visit his website and Behance portfolio.