These photos were taken at the Krafla geothermal area in northern Iceland. We stayed at Myvatn for a couple of days. Vatn means lake... so to refer to "Lake Myvatn" is really a redundancy, as is the term "Snaefellsjokull glacier"... as jokull means glacier. Myvatn actually translates to "Midge Lake", which proved to be fairly accurate, as there were little black flies everywhere. The flies didn't bite, but many perfectly good photos were ruined by swarms of them in the foreground.

There was so much to do at Myvatn that we worried about packing it all into 2 days. We ended up visiting the Krafla geothermal area at night. The sun never set in northern Iceland while we were there, so photography was actually possible between midnight and 2am... and that's when these photos were taken!

I think it was a mixed blessing to go at that time. There were no other tourists at a place that would have ordinarily been quite busy. This is a huge bonus. The desolation and time of day made everything far more surreal. There were a few downsides, though... Just because light was present doesn't mean the light was good. My camera can take acceptable shots at ISO 6400, but the best shots will always be the ones taken in good light. These could have been spectacular photos, but as it is they are kind of flat and grainy. By the end of the trip I was so exhausted and cold that I was knowingly sloppy with my photography. I didn't bother to swap out my wide angle lens for faraway subjects, and I fired off snapshots without thinking much about the camera settings.

There is a geothermal power plant at Krafla which looks kind of like a space station. At the power station is a vent which releases pressure and steam from deep underground into the sky. This steam can be seen in both of these photos as a giant plume rising into the sky. Sound can't be reproduced in a photo, but this vent made quite a roar. It was almost deafening. We couldn't hear each other talking, and at one point I wished for earplugs. The roar was loudest right near the vent, but could be heard throughout the whole geothermal area. It added to the surreal quality of the experience... Imagine picking your way through a deserted alien landscape at 2am with the howl of the steam vent reverberating in your mind.

We visited the Viti crater (seen here), and then explored some nearby lava fields with yet more natural geothermal vents. We had to wade our way through a field of mud and soupy melting snow before reaching the lava fields. Once there, there was a nice boardwalk for tourists to walk on, with dire warnings not to step in the boiling mud. Graem thought it odd that there would be a boardwalk in Iceland given the relative lack of wood. Maybe they ran out of wood, given that the nice safe boardwalk ended abruptly right around the time there were gaping chasms in the lava to be traversed. All of my photos from this leg of the journey were rather flat and underexposed.

The second photo is of the power plant and was taken on the way back to the hotel in Myvatn. By that time (about 2am), the sky was starting to get noticeably lighter! The lagoon in the foreground was bright, bright blue in real life.