Iceland - Snaesfellsnes Peninsula
I’m writing this from the Norröna, about four hours away from Tórshavn, Faroe Islands, and just under two days from when we should arrive in Denmark (update after I wrote this: a Force 10 storm in the North Atlantic caused us to spend an extra day in Tórshavn). By the time you read this, Ann and I will have been home in Didam for a handful of days.
I’m going to keep doing these posts - select images (hopefully decent ones) taken with our nicer cameras, instead of telling the full illustrated story of the trip - for the next several (read: 7) posts. The reason I’m doing that is that I can write most of the posts on the boat (it’s morning one and I’ve already selected and done the minimal development needed for all of the images for all the posts) and load them up when I get home and schedule them to come out over the next weeks. That will give me the time to actually look at the images I made during the trip. My Lightroom catalog says I made 8681 images (how is that an odd-number given that I make a RAW + JPG (i.e. 2 images) with each press of the shutter?). Going though 4,000 separate images (although much fewer distinct images because I tend to make multiples of each image due to changes in light, water texture, etc - but I still have to evaluate to determine which of the images is best) will take time. Approximately 1,500 of those images were made with the nicer camera, so I really haven’t even really looked at the majority of the images I made during the trip. And then there are my iPhone images which, if you followed me on Facebook, I used as my primary tourist camera and posted between 15 and 30 images a day from those I actually took (again, 2-3 presses of the shutter for each image). My old phone (5 years old) pooped out on me about a month before the trip so I’m hoping the new phone’s camera is better (it looks it). I tended to use my iPhone for the tourist shots I used to always make with the baby Leica. But I’ve also got to review, select and import a selection of those phone images I’d like to save because I used only the iPhone at a lot of locations. Long story short, I’ll be keeping up these summary posts that roughly track our trip to buy myself some time to actually go through my images.
So on with the post!
Ann and I decided to explore the Westfjords (the fjords on the western part of Iceland as the name suggests) after revisiting Landmannalaugar. The thinking was two-fold: (1) an Icelander we met during the Judy-John phase of our trip highly recommended it; and (2) the forecast for the rest of the country was bad (either rain, wind, or wind and rain), and it looked like the Westfjords was going to miss it for the most part. Well, they (read: we) didn’t. Except for a very short period on one of the days we got rain, wind or rain and wind the whole time. It didn’t stop us from driving through much of the Westfjords and making a few stops along the way, but we only pulled out the good cameras once (one shot Ann wanted to make) and we contented ourselves with checking things out with the more mobile cameras in the pretty nasty conditions. Also, a couple of the places we wanted to visit were blocked by massive road construction, apparently working to build a several mile stretch of road in the “off season” before winter hits. So our Westfjords excursion turned into a lovely scenic drive (with way too few pull-outs (more on that in a future blog post)) that we wound up doing in two days instead of an anticipated 4 days.
That took us to the Snaesfellsnes Peninsula where we stayed for a couple of days of photographing. Given that a lot of folks do the peninsula as a one-day excursion from Reykjavik, we had the luxury of taking our time driving around and pulling out the nice cameras when we wanted to. Which turned out to be sooner than we’d imagined. As it does in Iceland, the weather decided to do the opposite of what was forecasted a couple days earlier and it cleared for us (though it kept the rain in the near-by Westfjords going). We were greeted with lovely morning light early in our drive across the peninsula. Weather in Iceland is very regional and, at times, local.
Like the rest of Iceland, the Snaefellsnes Peninsula is the creation of volcanic activity and the landscape plainly reveals that
On the first day we pretty much drove around most of the peninsula, making a few stops but not really photographing much. It was as much a scouting trip as anything. The weather turned a bit in the afternoon (to nobody’s surprise), but that offered us an opportunity to take advantage of the amazing light that can happen in changing conditions.
We had used the first day to scout out some places and returned to them the second day. One was a beach where we opted for our smaller point-and-shoots that I know produced some decent images. Those will show up in a later post. The skies turned cloudy on us (again), so that killed another shooting location that Ann had targeted. That left us with a planned hike inland from the image above.
The hike was through a lava area that offered a range of subject matter . . at first.
And as the hike wore on, changing weather conditions (again and again).
The more we hiked, the more the weather turned out to be less than ideal (read: loose lava clusters under your feet accompanied by cold winds and periodic sprinkles) with fewer and fewer photographic opportunities. Not everything interesting to look at makes for a good photograph. So we finished the hike and headed into the near-by town for an early dinner. An hour or so later, we found very different weather conditions than when we entered the restaurant, so we drove back to access road we’d been on earlier.
We’d made the right decision. The high winds we’d suffered through earlier had brought a front of different weather. At that point it was a matter of waiting for the moving clouds to change the lighting conditions on the landscape and then make the decision about which image to develop.
Our stop at the Snaefellsnes Peninsula was worth it. But it was time to move on; we had another dinner in Reykjavik with Ann’s classmate to look forward to the next day.