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.