Weekend in Iceland

Flying WOW Airlines through the northern lights to Iceland, all pictures 2017, all photos ©Frank Ward.

It has been months since my last post. Several other photography blogs are also publishing less. Like letter writing, blogging seems to be near extinction. Remember writing letters? If you were born after 1999 you probably never had a chance to write a letter.

Walking the steamy streets of Geyser.

Reykjavik Harbor.

I know many photographers who are regularly Instagram-ing their picture output. I don’t like uploading through the iPhone as required by Instagram. I don’t even like photographing with the iPhone. It’s too easy. I like a camera that needs to be told what I want it to do, I don’t want an app pre-set to give me an Instagram picture formula.

Mural in Reykjavik

In November, Reykjavik had six hours of light per day. Three for sunrise and three for sunset. Jay Maisel taught me to avoid photographing between the hours of 10am to 4 pm because that is theoretically the least interesting light of the day.

In Iceland, dawn at 10:00 and sunset at 4:00 creates an experience of low sweeping light all 6 hours of the day.

As I stood appreciating the above scene, there were about 20 photographers with cameras on tripods around me. I am accustomed to being where dozens of photographers are not, like in Central Asia or Siberia. Who knew that Iceland in November was the place to be?

The geyser in Geyser erupted every few minutes. The experience is incredible, and so were the crowds. I liked photographing the crowd through the steam.

There are around 350 thousand residents on an Island and about 1.8 million tourists visiting per year. I know that isn’t a great ratio, but the island has miles of beautiful, forbidding, solitary landscapes. You could head out with a 4 wheel drive vehicle and be alone for as long as you can stand it.

Possibly a geyser from a distance, or someone smoking up a lot of fish.

Speaking of fish, my major issue with Iceland is the price of food and drink. Everything is at least two times what you might expect to pay.  I can understand that most edibles need to be flown in, but fish is plentiful and it is still very expensive. That said, fish soup is the culinary highlight of the island. Pay-up and enjoy.