Ok, of course there is always a story behind the picture: after long and adventurous drive to Kirkjufell along the slippery looking gravel road 54 in continuous rain, my wife and I arrived in our campervan on location some time past sunset at 1am in the morning. Kirkjufell was covered in grey skies, the occasional rain shower and no sign of a beautiful reflection as you see so on so many images of this location. My wife decided to sleep, so I took my gear, switched to BW mode and tried to photographic this iconic location from as many angles as I possibly could using a variety of lenses . That took me around 2-2.5hrs hours and tired I started to slowly walk back to the campervan when I saw a slight color in the sky in the corner of my eyes - oh no!! Do it all again now? So here I repeated most of my earlier comps, but this time with a bit of color in the sky. I still love the very misty mood of the image. This composition is of course nothing unique, but for me it is still a composition that shows so much of this iconic location. Captured ultrawide at 12mm on a Sony A7Rii with Canon 11-24mm.
Ever since I saw images of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness for the first time I wanted to visit the area and see these interesting rock formations for myself. A road-trip this fall via Arizona to Albuquerque gave me finally this opportunity. Unfortunately for me, my planning for this area was thrown out of the window when my GPS stopped showing my previously researched locations and my only choice was just to go out there and find them. It is so easy to get lost at Bisti, you just go over one Badlands and from there it looks all the same in any direction. After hiking for 45 minutes, I arrived at this location and was trying to figure out some compositions in this mess of a landscape - there were just too many hoodoos to get organized into a frame. At the same time thunderstorms started to brew in the East and South and then bang suddenly this super beautiful light arrived out of nowhere and I had to even more panic about finding a decent composition and get my tripod in place just in time. This is what I got! Due to the bad weather, my wife and I decided to stay overnight at a different place, so in total I had about 1.5 hours at Bisti!! Certainly a reason to go back there and be more organized!
Kirkjufell was my first location in this year's Iceland trip after I arrived in Reykjavik around midday. I made the drive to the location rather reluctant as I had been to this location before and had quite already some satisfying images in my portfolio of this iconic mountain. However, it was my first evening in Iceland and I was somewhat exhausted to search for other locations and the weather forecast for sunset was miserable for the whole island except the Snæfellsnes peninsula. My strategy for this year's Iceland trip was to completely follow the weather and not any pre-planned itinerary, even if this meant a lot of driving. I arrived at Kirkjufell with plenty of time, so I could even splurge on a $45 meal at the local restaurant. The light that then developed during sunset was one of the best I have ever witnessed, it just wouldn't stop, which allowed me to explore all sorts of possible compositions (good and bad ones!) along the waterfall. The place unfortunately turned to a 'zoo' later on with lots of photographers and workshop groups arriving incl. the local farmer who rightly got upset. I learned then for the first time that apparently this waterfall is actually on her private property. Nevertheless, I was very happy with this first night in Iceland and to top off my day I spotted my long-time friend Raymond in the crowd and we continued to take images at a different location until 4am in the morning.
