Iceland Photos, Part I
I had an epic time in Iceland, and great fun doing the landscape photography workshop with Andy Mumford (with local photographer Jeroen Van Nieuwenhove assisting and driving). I’ve followed Andy’s work on YouTube for a long time, so it was a real treat to be able to join this session of his workshop in Iceland, which is a country I’ve wanted to visit for many years.
The mid-March timing of the workshop was perfect. It wasn’t too cold and rarely got much below freezing — similar to what I’m used to in Maryland. There was enough snow to make the landscape pop but not blanketing everything in boring flat white. We largely had good luck with the weather, and while we certainly had some snow and rain, we also were blessed with some great skies and light.
There were 8 of us (plus Andy and Jeroen) in the workshop, so it was a small group, which was perfect. We all arrived in Reykjavik on a Tuesday, and then on Wednesday headed north in our Mercedes van up to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula that juts out at the 9 o’clock position on the country. This was an all-day drive, with a couple of shorter stops along the way to photograph some smaller waterfalls at Hraunfossar. We then continued on north through more of Iceland’s spectacular wilderness.
Iceland is about the size of the UK, but with a population of less than 400,000 (versus over 66 million in UK), so it is very sparsely populated. It reminded me a lot of Mongolia.
Click images to enlarge.
Hraunfossar
The small waterfalls at Hraunfossar in the first two pictures were a surprisingly difficult place to shoot. The sun was fairly harsh, and finding good compositions was tricky as there were a lot of visual elements competing with one another. I think we all struggled a bit with those.
I treated this first day as a warm-up. While I’ve done landscape photography in the past, it’s been more “casual”. So I was out of practice at working with my tripod, and the darkening filters needed to slow down exposure to let the flowing water blur. I was also not used to using a camera backpack (normally I use a shoulder bag - but that doesn’t work when hiking around on rugged terrain). So it was just a lot of new stuff and habits to get used to. Plus environment-specific issues like: paying to which way you orient your bag when opening the flap so it doesn’t get blown open by the wind, and standing so you shield lenses and the camera sensor (when changing lenses) from rain and snow being driven sideways at 40mph!
Kirkjufell
At the end of the first day we paid a sunset visit to a famous spot called Kirkjufell, which combines a conical mountain (“Pointy is pretty” says Andy) and waterfalls. It is indeed a dramatic location, and it’s become popular with photographers, so we were amongst a whole host of tripod-wielding snappers.
The light was OK but not great, not really hitting the mountain in a way that showed off its shape. The following day we gave it a second try, also at sunset, and this time we got a beautiful combination of sun and dramatic skies. These lit up the mountain wonderfully, as well as the mountains behind where we were standing looking at Kirkjufell itself. Using a telephoto lens I got a lot of shots picking out dramatic (and fast-changing) light on those peaks that I’m very happy with.
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