Travelling with a film camera: Iceland, pt. 1
Preparations and the first day
This article is third instalment in the series of my adventures with a film camera, previously I wrote how I got the camera, and how I first took it on a trip to London.
So few months ago a friend came to me with the idea of going on a photo trip to Iceland. I of course was very interested: who wouldn’t love to spend an entire week in a country where the warmest temperatures reach 12°C with heavy rain, possibility of sandstorms and even risk of volcanic eruptions. This and of course the most stunning landscapes one can ever dream.
We hastily bought the plane tickets and discussed the possibilities of accommodation and sights to see, but then everything died off until the trip was in a week. Which is when we discovered a disturbing fact: Hotels are not cheap in Iceland and even if we had all the money, most of them were already booked. Apparently a lot of people are into freezing their tits off on top of glaciers while munching on whale burger with the side of puffin wings.
Fortunately there is plenty of campsites in Iceland which charge considerably less, yet still offer all the amenities to stay at least somewhat civil while navigating the country. So we decided just to roll with it and see what happens. We had a guesthouse booked for the first night in Reykjavik and that was it, rest was up to campsites and hopefully some last minute back seat bookings in hotels, as it is often possible to get great deals that way.
As the purpose of the trip was Photography, I first packed my film camera Olympus OM-4Ti, a travel tripod and one of those mechanical release cables that screws on top of the shutter button with a special thread.
Having learned from my previous trip it’s not always easy to get film abroad, I had acquired ten rolls of Kodak Portra 400 from very early on. I also had gotten some new lenses: the 28mm f/2.8 lens for wider shots, which I expected to be rather useful for landscapes and the 85mm f2.0 portrait lens, hopefully providing me with slightly closer view for slightly more distant objects.
So having packed all that I realised one thing: I am going camping into Iceland, legendary for it’s cold climate, unpredictable weather and massive puffin attacks! Okay, I may have made the last one up, but regardless it sounded like I needed to pack something more than couple of t-shirts and a towel (which by the way I forgot).
So on the last day before departure I went into camping equipment store to acquire a sleeping bag, sleeping pad and a hiking pillow. People I was travelling with already had two tents so there was no need to bring a third one. I had no idea what to buy exactly so I explained to the salesperson where I was going. Turns out she knew better than I would have guessed. She recommended a sleeping bag which has a comfort rating down to 0°C, I would personally have bought one that is graded for warmer climate, and as it turned out she was totally right recommending this bag.
We arrived in Keflavik airport when it was already dark outside. Turns out the airport itself is 50 km away from Reykjavik, but there was really well organized and reasonably priced shuttle bus service going from the airport to all accommodations in Reykjavik and nearby. After an hour of bus ride in almost complete darkness we arrived into our guesthouse without having seen a single bit of Iceland outside of the heavily tourist packed airport terminal.
In the morning when we woke up, hastily grabbed the car from a rental and went to the central of Reykjavik to take some pictures.
Reykjavik was definitely different and exciting. We spend some hours there, exploring the sights and checking out couple of food places which were all really amazing.
One of the more memorable places we visited just before we left the city was The Einar Jónsson Sculpture Garden, which gave me some pretty interesting photo opportunities.
We hit the road to see some of the beautiful Icelandic landscapes — the reason we came to the country in the first place. And we were quite excited by the very first mountain we came reasonably close to.
We knew there was going to be much better views and light in coming days, but this still didn’t stop us from stopping the car on the shoulder of the highway and running to take pictures, excited like small children.
The light was pretty bad, and in all of my excitement I made several mistakes while taking the picture too, but fortunately I had plenty of more film and time to capture the wonderful nature of iceland.
Our inital goal was to visit the so called Golden Circle sites such as Þingvellir National Park, the Gullfoss waterfall, and the geothermal area in Haukadalur, which contains the geysers Geysir and Strokkur, picking up random pictures as we went.
So there are two geysers in the park. One of them known as The Great Geysir who in it’s whole greatness does absolutely nothing. It is mostly inactive, waking up once in every few decades to give a good show and go back to sleep.
There is also another geyser mistakenly known as “The Geysir” just 50 meters away. It is actually called Strokkur. This one does blow 20 meter columns of boiling water in the air at regular intervals of few minutes.
I did capture couple of pictures of it blowing, but they are rather boring, so I am just gonna leave you with an image of two tourists admiring their own picture of Strokkur blowing. Judging by their faces, they got much more interesting result than I did.
We ended our day by setting up camp few kilometers away on a nearby campsite, where you could still clearly see the Strokkur blowing every few minutes. One of the most stunning aspects of Iceland for us Estonians: being able to see things happening many kilometers away.
Next day we went on to explore Thingvellir, Gullfoss and many other exciting sites, but this is a story you can read in the next chapter of this epic adventure.
