Iceland One-Off - The Problem With Iceland
Before anybody gets it into their head that we didn’t love our trip to Iceland, or that it isn’t a stunningly beautiful country, or that its people were anything other than gracious hosts (well, there was that one woman in the grocery store that was either in a terrible rush or in a very bad mood that day or was just that way, but the next woman in line apologized for her behavior, so I’m saying that one incident doesn’t count), let me be clear - we loved our trip, Iceland is a stunningly, fantastically beautiful country and the people are wonderful.
But no place is perfect, no trip is perfect. And Iceland shares some of the difficulties for photography (at least the way Ann and I like to photograph) that we’ve found the rest of Europe shares (at least where we’ve been). And the Iceland trip shares some of the difficulties for photography that all “new” places share when doing a trip like this. And part of the problem lies with us as photographers, whether it’s our preference for how to photograph, the flexibility in seeing/working that we lack or our inability to mentally bock out distractions (like people, lots of people, a whole lot of people). In many ways, Iceland made us realize how good we had it in the United States in terms of access to locations and the freedom of movement you can have once you get there.
I was in Ann’s office a couple of weeks back and she had the image below on her screen. It captures what I call “The Problem With Iceland.” It was taken with her iPhone from the bimobil at a pullout we had (finally) reached during our drive through the Westfjords. We were approaching the base of one of the fjords and it was very low tide. You can see the road continuing on the other side of the fjord at the base of the cliffs as the road made its way westward along an undulating coast. The light is lovely, the landscape stunning to look at. But herein lies the (ok, one of the) problem(s). As beautiful as it is, it’s only an ok photograph. Ann did the best she could with it but there wasn’t much more that really could be done from this location, thus Ann didn’t pull out the bigger cameras. And there are very, very, very few locations where you could stop, so this was it. I think we measured approximately 15 km in either direction between pull-outs.
Time and time again we would come across a stunning view that would have made a great landscape photograph, only to drive for another 5, 10, 15 kilometers before we got to a stopping point. By then, of course, there was no photograph to be had. We can say that there are way too few stopping areas along main roads in Iceland generally, but particularly in the Westfjords. They need to hire us or some other photographers to tell them where to put more pull-outs because . . . damn! The ones they have, as few as they are, do not do the landscape justice and some of them . . . it’s like they intentionally decided to locate the pull-out at the ugliest view they could find. That’ll show the tourists!
Another of the problems is that there are so few places where one feels like it is possible to just wander around. Even if you find a location that isn’t jam packed with tourists (which all of the big sites are), you have signs telling you to stay on the trail and to not walk off-trail. We get it, like much of Europe, the majority of Iceland is private land and those owners are gracious enough to allow people on their land to see amazing landscapes. I can’t imagine they would appreciate tourists (like us) tromping all over their land. Perhaps we just didn’t fully understand when we could or could not wander, just as we were hesitant to just turn down a dirt road to see where it leads to (remember - it’s almost all private land, and I doubt anyone really wanted the bimobil to drive down their driveway). Perhaps it’s part of being a visitor, not knowing where we could and could not explore, and part not wanting to be “that tourist.” Still, it was a problem.
By problem, I mean problem for us getting the photographs we knew could be made (if we could have stopped), or that did the landscape we were seeing justice. If you think that some of the images I’ve been posting show an interesting landscape, I can tell you that there are hundreds of more, often better landscapes to see were we just couldn’t stop to photograph. That’s why there will be so many “through-the-windshield” iPhone shots (yeah, I learned to shoot while driving (Ann I think has finally recovered)) in the trip stories. There was no place to park, and most (but not all) places you could park didn’t really allow you to wander around.
Like Portugal and some parts of the Netherlands, there’s a lot of “viewpoint” photography in Iceland. Roads, pull-outs and stopping places at “ideal” locations for a picture . . . but then no ability to wander the area for a different perspective of an amazing view. Trails galore through parks or targeted destinations, but nobody walking off trail through the woods or meadows. That’s in part to protect sensitive mosses in some locations, but not in all. I guess it’s like that even in the US and the desert South West. Until you’ve been there a couple of times, you don’t think much about where and how you can wander around (and where you shouldn’t) and on your first visits you don’t have nearly the freedom you have once you do understand the landscape and the locations where roaming around is permitted.
Another complicating factor was the fact that we had to spend every night (save one) in a formal campground (but even that site had a designated area for overnighters). Campgrounds in Iceland are . . . while the facilities are usually pretty good, there are generally no formal parking places and a good number of people come in late in evening well after dark and park nilly-willy (I.e., wherever they can find a spot - even if it’s right in front of your vehicle). I guess that’s what folks do when they have a week or so to see the entire country, but it leads to disruptive evenings and difficult early morning departures. Then there’s the fact that the whole “camp at the closest campground to your desired location” isn’t quite the same as camp at the location you want to photograph at in the morning, which Ann and I so appreciated in the US.
And, of course, there was the Icelandic weather. We had been warned and it lived up to its reputation. The winds and the rain can be intense. The fog all encompassing. Often a sustained nasty weather pattern came at an odd portion of our schedule. That meant that certain parts of our trip - some of the F-Roads with Judy and John, and our cruise through the Westfjords - were really messed up by the weather (not to mention that one of the F-Roads was closed the entire time we were there due to glacier melt). Imagine going there for a week and being hit the whole week with that kind of weather. Weather, as always, was going to pose some problems on a two-month trip. And face it, Ann and I had one of our Utah trip turned upside down by a typhoon that ran up the Baja coast, through Arizona and into Utah that turned the desert into vehicle killing clay, so it’s not just an Iceland thing. It’s one of the hazards of photography vacations and you lean to deal with it.
I decided to write this post because I couldn’t quite figure out how to make the above points when thinking about writing the trip posts. (I’ll admit, that may be just an excuse for not having started them at the time of writing this, but . . . .). I didn’t want to sound like I was griping all the time. It wasn’t like that, but it wasn’t perfect either. But we learned to deal with the problems and photograph when we could, simply admire the landscape when we couldn’t, and do our best to avoid or not be annoyed by the crowds.
Because I really have not said it enough, Iceland is stunningly, amazingly, and fantastically beautiful!