I’m back from Iceland, sporting some new and pretty pictures and a cold I caught somewhere along the way. This was my second trip to Iceland and it won't be my last. I really like Iceland.
The weather on this trip was generally cold and cloudy with some great moments of sun and some impressive moments of rain and wind. But the sometimes inclement weather didn’t stop us from finding and photographing some pretty amazing scenes, like this one late in the day looking east towards Reynisfjara beach and the Reynisdrangar sea stacks near Vík. With the sun going down behind us, rainbows would form in the crashing waves, sometimes several rainbows at a time!
Click on the images for an enlarged view.
We were able to see and photograph some incredible sites including the ice beach at Jökulsárlón. Now that was challenging. And fun.
The goal is to get the motion of the surf retreating around a chunk of ice. For me, a shutter speed of 1.3 seconds was giving me the results I liked. But the foreground is constantly changing with every wave that comes in. So you need to wait until a wave comes in, often flowing past you and your tripod, and then starts retreating. The sand under your tripod is shifting. The wave often will move the chunk of ice. So the challenge is to wait until your tripod isn’t moving and (hopefully) the ice isn’t moving, to take the shot.
And occasionally, an extra big wave comes in. You really need to be paying attention and be on the look out for this to happen. I the wave is not too big, you can just stand there and let it flow past you. You should be wearing rubber boots, or over shoes, along with rain pants. And the rain pants should not be tucked into your boots. More than once I had a good size chunk of ice bump into me.
But sometimes, the wave is a little too big to chance letting it hit you and that’s the time where you retreat. And if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to do it gracefully and not like a panicked bird.
One of my favorite locations was Eystrahorn (Eastern Horn). This is the farthest east we went. It was really a perfect day for this with the clouds moving in and out and the light just getting better and better. We found more foreground material than we knew what to do with. And I, being a wide-angle landscape foreground junkie, was in my element.
We visited the black sand beach of Reynisfjara near Vík one morning for a sunrise. And even though it was a cloudless sunrise, and therefore no spectacular color, I was rather pleased with the results.
One of the reasons I scheduled this trip for late September to early October was to see and photograph the fall color of Iceland. On the first day of heading out into the country we stopped at Hraunfossar (Lava Falls) to see the falls and the fall color.
We also saw plenty of color in lava fields and low growing vegetation.
This shot was made by combining two images, one for the foreground and peak, the other for the sky. In Photoshop I created a mask for the sky from channels and then blurred it to get a good looking blend and then brought the image back into Lightroom to finish it. This image accurately represents what my eye was seeing at the time: brilliant fall color with a peak and threatening clouds looming in the background.
All in all, a very enjoyable trip. We saw some amazing sites along with a bit of rain and strong winds. Our guide, Christopher Lund from Iceland Photo Tours did a wonderful job getting us where we needed to go, offering suggestions, and just being an all around good guy.
I'm already thinking of my next trip to Iceland.
Here are a few more pictures from the trip
