Taking a Shot at Iceland

TAKING A SHOT AT ICELAND by Katja Riedel

Goðafoss – the waterfall of the gods in the evening light. One of the many tourist hot spots

I celand is a dream for landscape photographers. There is an abundance of waterfalls, oddly shaped mountains, lonely beaches, gigantic waves, interesting sea stacks, volcanic steam vents and to top it off, light and clouds change constantly due to the volatile weather.

So when my last tourist-guiding gig ended in Akureyri in the North of Iceland I was keen to tag on a few days of holidays for photography. What I discovered was that Iceland can play with you. One of its character traits must be irony, because it jeopardized all my carefully laid out plans, deconstructed my preconceived ideas of the pictures I wanted to take, and probably also had a good laugh about me.

If you google Iceland photography, you will find thousands of beautiful landscape pictures and several dozen photographers that offer guided photo tours in Iceland. For example, New Zealand’s Rob Brown and Craig Potton took a load of Kiwis around the island in June.

Being a bit tight on money, I couldn’t afford to join one of these very expensive photo tours. But I did the next best thing, I downloaded an ebook from the internet, describing all the photographic hot spots, when to visit and where to go. Armed with this book, a four-wheel drive and two plastic bags full of groceries, I set off. I would take Iceland’s ring road clockwise to Mývatn, through the Eastern Fjords and along the South Coast back to Reykjavik.

And that is where the problem starts. Everybody takes the Ring Road, the difference is only if clockwise or anticlockwise. And everybody stops at the tourist hot spots like Hverir (belching mudflats and hissing steam vents), Dettifoss (the biggest waterfall in Europe), Jökulsárlón (an ethereal lagoon full of blue icebergs) and Dyrhólaey (a huge sea arch). And while all these destinations are wonderful and stunning, they also feel defiled due to the sheer number of visitors every day. A million visitors per year are A guided photography group at Skógarfoss jockeying for the clearest, tourist-free view of the waterfall. The group leader even moved on some tourists which were lingering too long in the firing direction of his charges.

now coming to Iceland, threatening the very thing everyone is travelling to see: Iceland’s unspoilt nature. Places are now roped off, vegetation is trampled and signs have been put up to keep people from straying off-track.

For me as a want-to-be-photographer there is an additional problem. At each place I feel compelled to take a photo. And not just any photo, but a GREAT landscape shot. However, the scene I photograph at each stop is exactly the same scene that has been photographed a million times by a million travellers before me. I try to get something unique only to find a much better shot of the same scene exhibited in a coffee shop down the road.

The rising sun transforms a piece of ice at the beach close to Jökulsárlón The one place in Iceland that I wanted to visit more than any other was Jökulsárlón in the Southeast of Iceland. Here pieces of ice from the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier are being sculpted by the sea and then washed onto a black sand beach. When I went there in the dark an hour before sunrise I wasn’t sure where to go, but I needn’t have wor- ried, because already from a distance I could see plenty of car lights. And when I pulled in, it looked like a supermarket car park on Saturday morning. Just as I packed my gear another busload with 20 photographers arrived. Each armed with a huge photo backpack and tripod sprinting to the beach. Luckily, photographer density decreased with distance from the car park, and by walking for 15 minutes I managed to find a stretch of beach I only had to share with two others.

I have to say that I had a glorious morning. When the sun rose each piece of ice became a diamond, precious and sparkling. I took hundreds of pictures and a few of them I like, which is why I am sharing them with you, but did I get anything unique? No, I most certainly did not. This is the problem with these pre-chewed, pre-sanctioned and pre-loved photographic sites. Whenever I got there, a guided photography group was already there, all jockeying for the clearest, tourist-free view of the waterfall, all trying to create the illusion of isolation. Or they would pile nearly on top of each other, their tripods stacked millimetres apart, for the one and only perfect composition.

Grjótagjá is a grotto filled with 46°C hot water. The steam makes beams of light visible that filter through cracks in the roof. The locals used to swim here, but then volcanic activity increased and the springs got too hot.

Aldeyjarfoss in the Mývatn region. You need a 4-wheel drive to get to this waterfall and walk the last bit, so it sees less visitors.

Now to the irony; I went to Iceland to record it, see it through my lens, take “amazing photos”, package it all up and take it home. But it played with me and taught me to forget about expectations and to accept what is there. Instead of dramatic clouds I got grey drizzle, instead of sunshine I got rain and despite trying really hard, checking the aurora borealis forecast every evening and getting up in the middle of the night when there was the faintest chance of a clear sky and some activity, I didn’t get any good pictures of the Northern Lights! Until my last night on the way to the airport, when Iceland put on the most amazing light show. Was it laughing at me? Or was it a departing gift, showing me that once you let go and accept what comes along everything is possible? Don’t forget, life is what happens while you are busy making other plans - even in photography!

(PS: The ebook is “Forever Light” by Sarah Marino and Ron Coscorrosa. And it is good, if you don’t mind going where everybody else went.)

Sunrise at Vestrahorn in the South East of Iceland