Iceland Day 1

For as long as I can remember I have wanted to go to Iceland and take pictures. The landscape, weather, horses and Northern Lights have been on my bucket list of things to photograph. This brought us to Iceland in November. Oddly the weather is cloudy, rainy and sometimes snowy this time of year however it is also the time of year the solar storms were very active and the solar storm cycle is in its peak. It is on an 11 year cycle so 2024 and 2025 is the height and then it will cycle down and then back up again. More about the lights later.

I have always preferred photographing nature, landscapes or details of objects in nature. Recently I have enjoyed taking photos of human objects in nature, exploring our relationship place in our natural world. Often it creates an interesting Juxtaposition of objects in the scene. After all we are part of nature and not outside of it.

I think being in a place I have always wanted to take photos with limited time makes me push to take shots that are not the best but I want to capture something. I do think I got some good shots but a lot are shot in not so ideal light and or other conditions. Luckily Iceland is a beautiful place and that helped me tremendously.

On day one we hit the ground in Iceland at 5am and didn’t really stop until the evening. One thing to note is this time of year the sun doesn’t rise until about 9:30am and starts to set about 4:30pm. Not a lot of time for photographs, especially handheld which is mostly my only option on family trips. The mountains above were beautiful with the clouds and the colors of lava rock, vegetation and snow and ice. I was too far away and it was windy so I didn’t get the cleanest shots of this vista but I still like the colors and values. Despite the wind and precipitation we did see other people out and waking. We did talk to one local and she said Icelanders use their cars like coats, the drive everywhere and use them to keep warm instead of bundling up like tourists.

On our first day we didn’t have anything planed until after noon. We did want to see Grótta Island Lighthouse. We had read about it and it was a suggested site to see. It is in Seltjarnarnes a town next to Reykjavík.

Nowhere in our reading about the lighthouse did it say you couldn’t get close to it. I still really like the photos I took of the light house albeit from a distance.

Reykjavík means “bay of smokes”, this name comes from all the hot springs and the steam that came with them.

There was steam I promise, I just didn’t capture it.

The rock and its hot spring was situated behind this shack. The water was very warm and felt good on my cold hands.

The building in the foreground is a geothermal pump station with an art installation on it.

The old way of building houses in Iceland was to build a stone wall with a sod roof. We saw some on farms while in the less populated areas but some modern homes in Re Reykjavík did have grass growing on them.

Many of the roofs in Iceland have bright colors I assume to get them through the winter months of dark and grey skies

"Bureaucrat" statue outside city Hall in Reykjavik. Most Icelanders I met were kind and easy going. They seemed to live by the philosophy, to each their own. They were not worried about differing views on many issues. However they did seem to not care much for bureaucrats and bankers.