For my first post in this community, I wanted to share my experience about a specific day that happened in my trip to Iceland in March 2017. I was travelling with my girlfriend in a rental van from Happy Campers and Gatklettur was the second stop of our trip around the island. We hadn't slept a lot because we did not want to miss the auroras on our first night so I was still pretty tired. We woke early after maybe 3 hours of sleep to get there in time for the rising sun. I had checked a bit online beforehand to have an idea of what there was to see in the area.
7:19AM: The area was nice and I started taking pictures. Took the first few shots in portrait orientation and started playing with the exposure time to try to find the best combination.
At the specific time and place, I found that an exposure of about half a second was giving me a nice movement in the waves while they were crashing on the rocks. I spent a few more minutes trying to find the perfect splash. I was kind of sad that the sky was bland.
Most of the time, what makes for a great landscape picture is having your subject framed with a perfect balance of clouds and sunlight popping through.
7:24AM: Soon there was a bit of sunlight coming through and the colors started to change to a warmer feel. I really liked what I seeing on my LCD screen and it would have been fine with me. I already had some great shots that I was happy with.
7:27AM: Since I was already happy with the pictures that I had, I started looking around for some other interesting things to shoot. This was shot just a few steps from where I was but facing the other way.
7:50AM: There was also this little house all alone by itself close to the cliffs. It seemed like it could eventually fall into the sea over time with all the storms and the erosion.
8:03AM: Decided to try to capture the same house but with a longer lens. I wanted to use the compression of a telephoto to give the impression that the house was much closer to the water than what it was in reality and that it was also smaller in comparison with the mountains that were far behind. I don't usually use longer lens when doing landscape photography, but I felt that this would work in this particular moment and I think it does.
8:16AM: I was about to leave the area thinking that I had some good shots... but a better sky would have been great to start with. Suddenly, the sun started to peek through the clouds on the horizon, so I came back with my first subject and experimented some more settings while the waves kept on crashing on the rocks...
8:22AM:Since the sky was getting really interesting I decided to push my luck a little and climbed down the steep cliff to try to get a better point of view. My girlfriend was a bit worried about the idea because apparently that there were warning signs everywhere in the area but i reassured her that I would be cautious.
8:27AM: Finally, at some point, the sun blasted it's rays of light only for a few brief moments while I was on the shore. The timing, the point of view, the experience, everything was perfect. I left the area after that thinking to myself that I had almost missed that opportunity because I wanted to leave a few minutes earlier. To this day, this picture is still one of my favorite. After that day, I always stayed a little longer... just in case.
