After two weeks in Iceland, I’m now back home and looking back on some wonderful moments spent in the Icelandic wilderness.
Having led 8-day tours along the South Coast as a photo coach for Brockmann Phototravel in previous years, this was only my second full round trip around the island. What a run of weather we had – for the first time in ten years, I didn’t experience a single day of stormy conditions. There was very little rainfall and an extraordinary amount of sunshine.
Our photographic yield reflected that – I was able to capture some great images myself and am presenting them across three blog series, each with 20 photos:
- Home of the Puffins
- Colours of the Icelandic Summer
- Seabirds of Iceland
This trip once again offered the best of both worlds – landscape and wildlife photography. In part two, I’ll showcase classic landscape shots.
Bird photography went especially well this time, and I was finally able to realise a few long-held photo ideas together with the participants.
One highlight was a spontaneous session with Arctic terns in the middle of a lupin field bathed in the most beautiful evening light. But we also had two unforgettable nights with the puffins, and I hope the photos will reflect just how special they were.
From a technical perspective, I took a slightly different approach this year: I decided to leave my large telephoto lens at home and instead used the small Nikon 600/6.3 PF. Last year, I found the large telephoto quite unwieldy when photographing Arctic terns or working on the narrow walkways near the puffin cliffs – particularly when using a tripod. In such fast-paced, reactive situations, it’s important to be able to reposition quickly – but holding the big 600/4 handheld for hours just wasn’t feasible. The smaller 600mm worked brilliantly, allowing me to capture many scenes that I simply wouldn’t have managed otherwise. I was especially pleased with its performance in backlighting – something I had been sceptical about beforehand. And it held up well at 840mm too, which was important to me.
Of course, I had to be much more selective in choosing my angles, as the smaller lens offers noticeably less background separation than I’m used to – but particularly in bird colonies, it still works very well, I think. But judge for yourselves based on the images 😉.
This trip was an absolute joy, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Conny, Michael, Sylke, Gerhard, Dagmar, and Claus 😊🙏
I hope you enjoyed the series 👋