These photos were taken in Reykjavik on our first day in Iceland. There is a lake called Tjornin in the middle of Reykjavik where people gather to feed the birds. Consequently, the lake is filled with ducks and gulls. When I took these photos, I was basically just playing around with my relatively new telephoto lens. It was early afternoon and we still had a bit of time to kill before checking into our hotel at 2pm. We had flown all night, wandered around Reykjavik all morning like vagabonds, and I was fairly exhausted by the time we reached Tjornin.

This was the ideal place for taking bird photos - the people were occupied with throwing bread to the birds, and the birds were occupied with eating this bread... I could basically just snap away, unobserved. Later in the trip, we visited a conservation area that was supposed to have 13 species of duck. I was excited, but I saw only 1 or 2 species... from a VERY great distance. I took a few photos, but none worth posting (or really even looking at twice). Little did I know that my best duck photos had already been taken in Reykjavik.

I love the colors in the photo of the buildings around the lake. I didn't touch the colors in post-processing. What you see here is what I saw through the viewfinder (with the exception that the horizon is straight). This was one of my first times using a polarizing filter, and I like the effect on the colors and the sky.

One of my colleagues was mocking my duck photos... He said that he can't believe someone would go to Iceland to photograph mallards, and that the duck photos probably cause me to lose most of the audience for my web album early on. Be that as it may, this photo of a duck splashing is the most viewed photo in my Iceland web album thus far... Somebody must find it at least worth clicking on.

The Iceland photos are finally posted! Sorting them and getting them ready has required nearly 2 weeks of nonstop work... hence no regular posts here. I still plan to post some of the better ones here in the coming days. In the meantime, here is a link to the Picassa web album.

The photo posted today is of Gulfoss. There are many waterfalls in Iceland. Some are heavily visited tourist attractions, and some are just found in the hills or at the side of the road. Gulfoss is one of the better known tourist attractions in Iceland. I honestly thought none of my photos there would turn out. It was hard to compose a shot without getting a bunch of people in the frame. It was a windy day, and I was pretty much soaked with the spray from the waterfall. I thought I would have water drops all over the camera lens. Nonetheless, I was blessed with a rainbow and amazing light. The lens stayed dry long enough to fire off (literally) a couple of good shots.

I worked on the Iceland photos this weekend pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. I have about 90 ready for posting (of an estimated 400-500). I have pretty much decided to put them in a web album. I'll send out a link after I have all of the photos in the album. Quite a few people have been asking about the Iceland photos who would just want to view them all at once, without being bothered by text or scrolling through a blog. Also... 500 photos represents about a year's worth of blog-fodder. Much as I loved Iceland, I'm sure I'll want to post photos of something else this year! What I will be doing is posting the best photos to the blog, as well as those that have interesting stories behind them.

Here's the first.

This is a photo of Snaefellsjokull glacier (jokull means glacier in Icelandic). It was taken on the fourth day of our vacation. At this point in the trip, I was very stressed out about our slow progress. I had been reading about Iceland on the internet and in our travel handbook. I had seen a few 2-week itineraries created by other people which basically involved touring the Golden Circle (Thingvillir, Geysir and Gulfoss) on the first afternoon, then taking in the Snaefellsjokull glacier/peninsula on the second day. Well... We received our rental jeep very late on the second day, then got cranky, hungry and lost wandering around Thingvillir... never mind Geysir and Gulfoss! On the second day, we got sidetracked hiking up a mountain barely 30 minutes outside of Reykjavik... we never even saw the Snaefellsjokull glacier, let alone the whole peninsula! I had identified things that I wanted to see throughout the island, and already we were so far behind in our itinerary. It was at this point we decided we were going to have to skip the Westfjords!

Iceland is pretty much taken over by tourists during the high season. If you're researching a trip there, you'll read about all of these things that you must see (Blue Lagoon, Golden Circle, etc). To be honest, my favorite parts of the trip (as a photographer and as a curious traveller) were those that fell off the beaten path a bit... those that we stumbled on accidentally. Yes... the highly publicized and well-toured waterfalls are amazing... but some of the waterfalls we found beside remote gravel roads were equally spectacular... and I could play around with my camera as much as I wanted to without worrying about other tourists. Yes... the geysir is worth seeing... but photographing the geysir surrounded by 50 tourists and a rope fence reminded me of photographing a lion in a zoo cage - not very exciting and frankly kind of sad.

Iceland has some beautiful paved highways. They have secondary highways which are well-maintained gravel roads, as well as rougher roads into the interior, designated "F-roads". The F-roads only open in mid-summer, once all of the melting is finished. In order to travel on F-roads, a 4X4 is required. We tried to rent one and were given a Toyota RAV 4 - as one of my coworkers put it, the soccer mom's 4X4. We took a little dirt and gravel road to Snaefellsjokull. At the road's origin from the highway, there was a sign saying, "Impassable". Being used to wimpy Canadian road signage, we scoffed at this and proceeded to take the impassable road. We hadn't yet learned that Icelanders don't mess around with road signs. If they say a bend in the road should be taken at 30km/h, that is probably a good suggestion. If they say a road is impassable, you might, for example, find yourself driving right up to a glacier - sheer snow and ice with no traversable path. This is what happened to us.

Looking through my photos, I must have been having some sort of brain malfunction when I chose my camera settings to photograph the glacier. Nonetheless, the light was good enough that day to make up for my ineptness. The Snaefellsjokull photos are among the best I've taken so far. Look forward to seeing more when I get the web album up.

Drumroll, please! The first of the Iceland pictures is here! Actually, you might find it rather anticlimactic. This is a photo taken from our first day in Reykjavik. We landed at Keflavik International Airport at 6:25am, which was 2:25am Ontario time. We took the Flybus into Reykjavik. We couldn't check into our hotel until 2pm, but thought we might at least drop the luggage off. The Flybus took us to a central bus station where a helpful employee told us that the public transit would take us to within a block of our hotel. The bus schedule told us to expect a bus every half hour, except for Sundays and holidays. We started to suspect that it might be a holiday when no buses came after nearly an hour of waiting. Google later confirmed this suspicion - May 24 is indeed an Icelandic public holiday. Armed with a map, we endeavoured to walk to the hotel. This photo was taken whilst we wandered the streets of Reykjavik in the early morning hours. It was sunny and a balmy 20 degrees. My sleep-deprived grogginess and annoyance at having to walk so far while carrying luggage was wiped away by avid curiosity about the city. We pretty much had the streets to ourselves at that hour on a holiday!

I took this photo because I loved the bright colors and the way the street signs lined up with the houses. The green car makes things perfect. I thought this would be an easy photo to post first since it required very little post-processing. It actually took me quite a while to get my horizon straight. I don't have Graem here to be my horizon police, and I'm not good at judging these things for myself. In this shot, a crooked horizon would be especially bothersome given all of the right angles and straight lines!

Reykjavik is a very interesting city. I found myself comparing it to Halifax, Vancouver and San Francisco, but it really is an entity of its own. It is definitely a 'big city', despite the fact that the permanent population is only about 120,000. There are lots of trendy and expensive restaurants and shops. At the same time, I never felt a sense of big city caginess or isolation. I was comfortable (and perhaps foolish) enough to leave my camera equipment in plain view unattended in our rental jeep.

I loved the Icelandic street signs. I wish I had taken more photos of them. The signs were always colorful, and for the most part very precise. One sign, for example, warned us that there was a 10% grade in the road coming up over the next 0.2 to 0.8km! Precision was mixed with total ambiguity. You can see 2 signs in this picture of a blue circle crossed out with a red line... What could that mean? We spent our whole vacation guessing what "No Blue" might mean. Graem even had a dream about it. It wasn't until we pulled into the airport on the last day that I figured out it must mean "No Parking". There were a couple of other colorful but ambiguous signs whose meanings still elude us.

I'm not really sure what to do with the Iceland photos. I'm going through them and still haven't seen them all. I'm tagging the best ones to go back to and consider for posting. I'm running into the problem of deciding which photos to post and where. So far, I have only identified about 20 really great photos. The problem is that they tend to be from the same day and/or the same location. If I only post the cream of the crop, I'll leave the misguided impression that Iceland = 2 waterfalls and 1 glacier. I certainly don't want to do that. The second tier of photos ranges from 'nice but not stellar' to 'mediocre, might have been taken with an iPhone'. Sometimes the light is terrible, I'm not on the ball as a photographer, or I can't get a clear shot at something without fences, powerlines or billions of other tourists in the way. I still want photos to help me remember these things. People who haven't been to Iceland might still find these photos interesting even if they aren't spectacular.

Red Bubble is for "art" photos - that is a no brainer. I'll post my technically best shots there, as well as some abstract ones. I'll cross-post the very best photos to this blog. The tier 2 photos are problematic in that there are so many of them. I think I'll have upwards of 500 photos to post when all is said and done. A good number will be posted on this blog, I think... but I may set up a Picassa album or Flickr account or somesuch for the rest.

A few of my coworkers have been bothering me to make a travel blog. These are the same people who told me I was crazy to want to go to Iceland in the first place. I don't know about that.. Making a blog is a lot of work. It would give me a venue to talk about things that aren't necessarily documented in my photos - Icelandic people and culture, the food, our hotels, the time that we stumbled on an '80s glam rock party while looking for a place to eat lunch...

I'll ruminate on it a bit, and I'd appreciate any suggestions. Right now I'm too tired to think.

I photographed these lilacs at the botanical garden shortly before leaving for Iceland. I have always associated the lilacs blooming with my birthday, because that's exactly when they would bloom when I was a kid growing up in Calgary. In reality, I haven't seen the lilacs bloom on my birthday in more than a decade now. In Edmonton and Saskatoon, they bloom later. In Ottawa this year, they were pretty much done blooming by the time my birthday rolled around. There were lilacs in full bloom when I visited the botanical garden, but I preferred these buds... to me they looked like little fists just ready to burst open and convert their potential energy into scent.

I just got back from a fabulous photography trip to Iceland, so you probably wonder why I'm posting a photo of some (very Canadian) lilacs. The answer is quite simple... I'm finding my Iceland photos overwhelming.

I took more than 3000 photos in Iceland. Tonight I sat down to look at them for the first time. It took forever for my photo management program to load them, and I would say I have probably viewed ~75% of them now... but nothing more than a cursory flip.

I'm in the sort of mood today where I hate all of my photos and I'm quite disappointed in how they turned out. I have a lot of dust on my sensor that will have to be edited out of most pictures. Iceland is a dusty place, and I wasn't as careful as I should have been with swapping lenses. Many of my wide-angle shots are marred by lens flare. I was a lazy photographer too... I left filters on when I should have removed them, left the tripod in the car when I should have used it, and I didn't start bracketing my shots routinely until fairly late in the trip... so blown-out skies, underexposed rocks and blurry waterfalls are common. All of my Reykjavik pictures are lousy, save for some remarkably sharp duck and seagull photos that I might have taken anywhere, and a photo of a residential street I took merely because I loved the symmetry between the houses and the street signs.

Part of this was due to laziness and my general apathy towards life these days (as well as relative inexperience as a landscape photographer). Part was due to the hectic nature of the trip, and the mobs of other tourists. In order to do this right, I needed much more time to wait for the right light conditions, concentrate on my composition, exposure, etc. We spent the whole 2 weeks frantically rushing around the island, and still didn't begin to scratch the surface of all there is to see. I needed to be more like Ansel Adams hiking around Yosemite surrounded by beautiful vistas with only 8 plates to expose. Only 8 plates... better choose your exposures wisely. I think that's what I need to work on in my photography now... take some trips and concentrate on quality over quantity. It's tempting to click the shutter a thousand times when I have so little time for photography, but I think that the only way for me to improve from here is to slow down a bit.

If all of this sounds depressing, it isn't necessarily. I'm often in a mood to hate all of my photos. I look at them later and feel differently. I go through similar phases where I think they are all amazing, and post a bunch. I come back a bit later and wonder what the hell I was thinking, embarrassed to have posted such shite. Chances are that I'll be more optimistic when I view these photos later on.

I have 3 days off this weekend with nothing much to do, so look forward to the first Iceland photos starting to trickle through. Graem uses every lame excuse he can think of to leave here and stay away as long as possible. Lo and behold, he has thought of another one already! I'm exactly where I was before the Iceland trip: lonely and slogging through my non-life, willing it to be over one day at a time.

I had previously eluded to my analogy between drycleaning and vacations. Drycleaning was magical to me when I was a kid... an item of clothing too fancy or too dirty to be cleaned by any conventional means was sent away and presto! It came back clean without even getting wet! Later I began to notice that the stains were never actually removed from the clothing... they weren't even really diminished. You might think that we used a lousy drycleaner, but I have noticed the same thing with every drycleaner I have patronized since. I developed a theory that drycleaners don't actually do anything to the clothes besides press them, repackage them, and give you the expectation that they are cleaner. Clothes that have sat in the closet for 2 years are rediscovered. You can go out for dinner somewhere fancy, look professional for a job interview, and just generally tackle life with a new perspective and renewed sense of confidence! And to think... it's all a nifty placebo effect!

Vacations are the same, if a bit more expensive than drycleaning. Going on vacation doesn't change your life in any way... it's still as lousy or as wonderful, as boring or as stressful as it ever was when you get back. Vacations take you out of the loop for a bit, though... and while you're gone, life is repackaged like a pair of wool dress pants so that you can see things from a bit of an outsider's perspective when you return.

We tried a new drycleaner shortly before we went to Iceland. They affixed yellow tags to the clothing, drawing attention to the stains: "ink stain on front pocket", "sleeves", "hair stain on collar" (what is a hair stain?). The stains were (of course) all still there when we got the clothing back... but this time, we had nice bright yellow tags to point out stains that we hadn't even noticed before! I can't help but feel that I'm being cruelly mocked by my own analogy.