Category: Atlantic Ocean

As my regular readers will note, I experienced mostly gloomy weather during my trip to Iceland. While the bad weather did nothing to overcome my Seasonal Affective Disorder, it did provide me with some incredible lighting conditions for landscape photography. The highlight of my trip was camping and shooting for 4 days at Landmannalaugar. I was disappointed that the colorful hills were covered in ash from the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, but their was still plenty of spectacular scenery to shoot everywhere I looked. I explored the main hiking trails from the campground and became particularly enchanted with the geothermal steam vents at the base of Brennisteinsalda. I returned to this surreal location 2 nights in a row and was rewarded with this dramatic image when the clouds parted and the sun illuminated the summit of Blahnukur in golden light.

Before I went to Iceland, I researched some of the locations that I intended to shoot, but had not paid that much attention to Landmannalaugar (pronounced Land-mann-a-loi-ger). This fantastic location, 4 hours from Rekjavik in the interior of Iceland, was a pleasant surprise. Fortunately, the 4WD road had just opened the week before my visit. After driving the final 40 off-road kilometers, two shallow river beds (with a rental car!) were the final obstacles between me and the scenic beauty that I was about to experience. I always try to get to a new location early enough to scout the area because I don’t like to be rushed, but it was definitely time to shoot once the car was parked. The sky was full of perfect cotton-candy clouds and the sun danced across the jaw-dropping scenery. I grabbed my camera gear and quickly set out to explore the river bed to the east of the campground. Within a half-hour of my arrival, I focused my attention on this composition to create this image.