Photographing Iceland – A Photo Guide to 100 Locations
by Einar Guðmann and Gyða Henningsdóttir
Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages + Protective cover
Date: 2022
Publisher: Some Icelandic Press
ISBN: 978-9935119483
Status: In Print (buy from Authors)
Date Read: 5 Dec 2023
Rating: 5/5 stars
Visiting Iceland was a great opportunity to exercise my photography skills. Landscapes are my favorite, and there are few places with such a dense concentration of worthy subjects like Iceland. In some ways, it’s like another planet, like driving on the road through vast lava fields (from a 1000-year-old eruption).
Or, standing in Þingvellir National Park waiting for the Aurora to show. Other than the 4 busloads of people milling around in the dark behind me, there isn’t another soul for miles. Also, shooting astro is a good way to test your familiarity with your camera’s controls. You can’t use a flashlight, you’ll ruin your night vision and possibly some folks’ shot.
We spent much of our time in Reykjavik doing the tourist thing, museums, shopping, and eating. On impulse, I picked up a copy of Photographing Iceland – A Photo Guide to 100 Locations by Einar Guðmann and Gyða Henningsdóttir. This is the single best photography book, I’ve seen. It’s a 350-page softcover full of advice and locations. It starts off with 80 or so pages of crap you need to know about Iceland and photographing landscapes. The photography part is all standard stuff, they shy away from pushing any particular gear. In fact, their recommended minimum is refreshingly light: the holy trinity of a wide angle, a standard zoom, and a telephoto. A sturdy tripod, an ND6 filter, and a remote release.
The stuff you need to know about Iceland is important and useful. The weather there is legit. You are in the middle of the North Atlantic and raining or snowing horizontally isn’t that rare. So they have advice about driving and clothes that is well worth reading. They also have many important safety tips. You are in Europe (kind of), and they don’t go in for American-style hand-holding around potentially dangerous areas. They will post a sign with something like, “If you go on the beach, pay attention to the surf or you may die.”
There are some great YouTube videos taken by tourists of other tourists damn near drowning in the surf. It’s all fun and games, but you get what the locals call a sneaker wave every five to ten minutes. And it’s 10x the size of the ones you’ve been stepping around. Their advice is, “Never turn your back on the ocean.” Seems reasonable to me.
The rest of the book is 2-5 pages on the 100 locations of the title. Each location has:
- A little graphic of Iceland with a dot showing you the location
- A QR code to a map
- The description of the location (with at least one stunning photograph)
- Directions on reaching the spot (often harder than you might expect)
- Accessibility information. They aren’t talking wheelchairs here; it’s whether or not 4WD is required and how early the road may open in the spring (some are as late as early July).
- Nearby towns with accommodations and food
- A list of the nearby items on their 100 list.
- One or more Pro Tips, Best Time of Day and Year, etc.
It has an amazing quantity of high-quality information. They set out to create the book they wished they had when they started out on their professional career. These 100 locations are light on the tourist areas. They steer you away from crowded areas and they define “crowded” as “there might be anyone else there when you go, even in summer.” My kind of people.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Even if you don’t expect to ever get to Iceland, the tips are genuine, not pedantic, and the pictures are first-rate. Books are an obsession for me, so in order to be able to also eat, I try not to spend any more than I must. But this is one case where I had no trouble paying the full price (Kr 6,299, whatever that was).
They have a YouTube channel that I can only describe as adorable. English is not their first language, yet they do these in English anyway. Nor are they much at acting or talking. In fact, like typical landscape photographers, they don’t talk much at all. But they try and it’s adorable. They also really care about their country and the environment so they include information on how not to heathenize the place while you’re there.
They also have two standard photography books: Grimsey and Iceland: Wild at Heart. Buy them off their website and they’ll autograph them. Adorable.