The only thing that separates a 4×4 hill climb course and an early winter road is a little blue sign.
To make it even more fun, dusk comes at 2:30 pm in November.
Whee!
Driving in Iceland is Fun
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Tag Archives: Photography
Magical Icelandic Light
In mid-November, there is no break between sunrise and sunset, just a switch in the spectrum. Here’s the pink morning light at Hafnarskógar, looking up to Hafnarfell.
As you can see, when you live in such light, you become inspired.
And the moon shines all day. Here it is around 2 pm, looking out Rauðanes way. Enough to inspire anyone.
At this time of day, the blue and pink start mixing it up.
An hour later, over on Rauðanes, it gives a last splash…
And then darkens …
… and both deepens and thins at the same time …
Tungokollur over Borgarnes
… until the next morning when it begins again, later yet.
It’s a wonder every Icelander isn’t a painter.
Weightless After a Long Day in the Icelandic North East
In the cold high desert of Northern Iceland, the water that has fallen from the sky holds it to the last of the light.
You feel it flowing through your veins and lose all weight.
Dusk Over Thor’s Shield
In November, when sunrise and sunset colours continue in unbroken unfolding light from dawn, near 10 a.m., and dusk near 2 or 3 p.m., it comes so quickly that you can see it open and close through the spectrum, as if you are inside a film, a really, really wide-angle 4-D film.
Here is a fraction of a second of its wonder over the volcano in early November, as I walked through flaming heather and pink snow at þingvellir. I shot the image with two much sky to illustrate how unsettling it can be. One feels at times that one can fall right off the Earth and drown in air.
Svartifoss: River of Blood
Perhaps it’s called Svartifoss (Black Falls) because it shows itself on a black basalt cliff.
Bad Light Helps One See Clearly Here
Perhaps it’s because the red autumn birches turn black with distance, and still the fall flashes.
Autumn Rain Really Brings Out the Light of This Land
In either case, it’s not the cliff that is named but the water.
It seems that when blackness falls it is visible. Of course, that means it’s not black at all…
… or that whiteness is also a blindness, beyond human life. We marvel. Life, it comes from nowhere, flashes with life, and then returns to mystery.
Svartifoss in Its Pool of Birch Blood
~
Svartifoss, Skaftafell National Park, South Iceland
Everyone Can be a Faded Polaroid at the Harpa and Dance with Yoko Ono Now
There is beautiful light in Iceland…
… and I mean really beautiful light …
… but tourism survives on images, so the great opera hall, the Harpa, allows anyone to view others as if they are in a faded Polaroid shot from the 1970s …
… or an Agfa shot from the 1960s.
This retro thing, this notion of quoting the landscape in the very moment one observes it, is something the Icelanders learned in graduate school in New York, London and Berlin. It’s charming, but remember …
… every wave that goes to sea in Skagafjörður leaves behind a space for beautiful light. It’s like the sun is right there, you know.
Hólar in the Spring
It is.
April Light on the Lagarfljót
Ice contains wisdom, of the year behind and the opening wisdom of the year to come. You can see it in the perennial sunrise and sunset colours of winter, but. April brings brighter tones, while snow storms still take the rest of the world away. It’s breathtaking. Bring your camera. Go East in April.
Leave the crowded south and its tourbusses. The great secret of Iceland is that it’s everywhere on the whole island. You don’t have to go to the crowded places. You will find there a sense of honouring and ritual. Out in the simple places, where no one else goes, you will find your self.
A Grove of Horses in Iceland
It was all forest once, in the whole country, at least by the water. Even here in Hvalfjörður, it was trees. But the trees were cleared to make pastures and to keep the Icelanders warm, and then there were no trees, and so it remains in most of the country. Because of this history…,
… horses are now trees. Stick a pale of hay in the middle of a forest clearcut 1000 years ago, and there you have it, a grove. As I’ve said. before, in this country everyone is an artist.
Photography Out of Bounds
The National Geographic will tell you that Iceland looks like this. Kirkjufoss, they call it.
National Geographic
You will be astonished how much trespassing you have to do to get a shot from that angle. In truth, though, Iceland looks like this:
We call that moss. Those little silver plants there? That’s a forest. Please, stay on the trail. Beauty becomes photography, taken from awkward angles, with weird blurring things going on, if you don’t.
Seeing in the Dark
One of the great pleasures of Iceland is to walk up a remote canyon, followed by ravens hoping you will slip and break a leg, and to know that they are your thoughts.
These thoughts.
It’s a northern thing. Of course, a country where a bell rope can serve as an improvised noose is a fine place to wander, too.
Darkness is everywhere, but it’s not black. It’s red or something, like blood.
The eye touches the earth as a bodily organ, as much as it does as the hand of the mind.
The mind is as much a heart as it is a muscle. It swims in blood.
Humans can’t see darkness, I read all the time. In Iceland, this illusion just doesn’t wash.
Maybe you can’t see it, but you can touch it, and enter through it the world behind the world.
And what is there?
Why, you are.
This doesn’t work in Reykjavik.
There, under the effect of the outside world, this sense of presence is called art.
One can live there, too. Between worlds.
Trying to catch the attention of passersby. 
Don’t worry. The world still sees you.
And you still see past it.
The old paths still wait.
A Farm in Iceland 
