Iceland travel for asian, {single camera} Part 2

Iceland travel for asian, {single camera} Part 1

The longer i delay writing this blog, the more details of the trip slips of my mind. When i arrived at Brynjar house (which i booked via airbnb), it was late at night and it didn’t take long before i found his house.

Surprisingly Brynjar, our host is a photographer too.

Brynjar offered me free use of his refrigerated films…if only i had bring my film camera! This is ironically fate’s dealing me a regret moment as Iceland was the only trip that i didn’t bring my film camera.

He published a book called Boston Reykjavik that contains images of Islandic people drinking and socializing in a local pub at the town. i feasted my eyes on those pure B&W images and flipped thru the whole book within the hour.

There is something about the light in Iceland, its just beautiful when the sun isn’t shy or the random drizzle of the rains.

The next day my family and i decided to just take it easy and walk to the town centre from our place. We passed thru this cafe named “Haiti” and ordered 3 breakfast, it was the most expensive breakfast we ever had in any tours 😉 . The cafe is just an average setup and three breakfast cost us around USD 75 for some sausages and eggs.

There is something wrong with Iceland kroner conversion with other currency, its overvalued and there isn’t any regulation to govern it, hence Iceland kroner are not available freely on the market.  So while the natives here might find the daily trades and value of groceries and items to be acceptable, they are in fact, expensive for anyone else outside of Iceland.

As we continue walking towards the main town area towards one of the tourist spot where a metallic viking ship is featured, we notice the calm and serene feeling that embraces us. Its around 20 minutes walk and you walk along this stretch of rocks that separates you and the sea(?).

You will eventually reach this metallic skeletal ship. This is one of those free sites that you can visit and so some selfie or photography here. I would wager that the sunset here would be awesome but i never had the chance to find out.

I booked a tour to the southern waterfall at the Harpa Opera house just 5 minutes away from the skeletal viking ship. The price is competitive having the booth positioned in the Opera house.

We also notice that most of the entrances of the houses we passed by on the way to the town have interesting flora and vintage like botanical settings.

The tour that we took to the southern waterfall was in a decent bus with wifi, it cost us around USD 300. That tour guide name was Fred and he was awesome, he could talk none stop and made silly voices while enlightening us with the historical story of the places that we passed by.

When we arrived at Skogafoss, we were glad we had our waterproof jacket, refer to our first post. 

I took all these images using the 35mm f2.8 Zeiss lens. What a wonderful lens for travelling if you are on the A7(x) family of cameras. I had water droplets all over the lens and camera and i brought some dry spectacle wipes from Daiso for usd 1.50 that i used a lot to clean up the gears.

Most of these images i only took them after i walked around the site and totally “soak in the moment”. I wanted to enjoy the real view without going thru a viewfinder or lcd and only after i am done with that, i begin to take pictures. I would advice the same for anyone that is going Iceland, enjoy the moment, the photos can wait, if you can’t enjoy the view infront without the gears, it’s better to watch youtube than to come here.

I do have some thoughts about what i could have done better at these waterfall sites, one of them would be the use of the iphone 7+ or any phone with 4k video recording to capture the scene, images are very limited on what it can convey when it comes to Iceland.

Now lets see some images of Reykjavik in Iceland Travel for Asian {single camera} Part III.