Highlands of Iceland
- Adam Monk
- Feb 8, 2017
- 2 min read
Just before taking off to Greenland last year I spent a couple of weeks driving around the wild Southern Highlands of Iceland exploring for this years Iceland photo tour. I had rented a 4wd camper van, which turned out to be clapped out Landrover Defender with a timber platform screwed together in the back as a bed… I paid more to rent this car for the two weeks than I would have paid to buy it back here in Australia! Still, it got me to some amazing places where you really do need 4wd, and provided shelter for the many times it rained. If you look carefully, you can see the car in the bottom left corner in the image below. From this distance you can’t tell just how tired and worn out it is. If you look even more carefully you can see the tiny shapes of two climbers on the mountain in the top right hand corner.
The Highlands of Iceland are completely different to the rest of Iceland, almost completely devoid of tourists for a start, or locals for that matter. The Highlands are a harsh, inhospitable land of raw lava fields and rhyolite mountains, not a friendly place to live. But they are also indescribably beautiful, really, really, stunningly beautiful!
It can be a very frustrating place for a landscape photographer, as everywhere you look is completely overwhelming. I kept saying “Wow” and found I couldn’t stop saying it. So rather than have complete meltdown I got out a couple of longer lenses I had recently acquired, a Phase One 75-150mm f4.5 (45-95mm equivalent in 35mm full frame) and a Mamiya 210mm f4 (130mm equivalent in 35mm full frame) and picked out some details from the sheer overwhelming awesomeness of the place.
I’m headed back there again later this year with the ultimate Iceland Highlands tour. 12 days of wild mind blowing countryside and wilderness photography in a mega 4wd, bright red super truck!
All these images were also shot on the Phase One XF-100… More later on this.