iPhone Friday

A chilly morning in Iceland just over a year ago made the perfect time to photograph Kirkjufell mountain at sunrise.

From last week’s warmth of Mumbai, India, we go to a chilly February morning in Iceland. This was just over a year ago, as my partner in crime, George Fellner, and I went to photograph the sun rising on Kirkjufell mountain. We scoped out the location on the previous day, so we had a good idea where we wanted to be. As Kirkjufell mountain is highly photogenic, there were several other photographers in situ.

Despite the competition, we found a pretty good vantage point…

Kirkjufell on Ice

We spent a good hour photographing majestic Kirkjufell in various stages of being illuminated. During this time, the ice flow provided a wonderfully muted reflection. That certainly increased the appeal of this vista for me. I love reflections, especially when they are a bit more subtle, such as in this image.

It was a good photo harvest during a chilly morning!

Snæfellsnes Peninsula – part 5

Magnificent Kirkjufell

Welcome to the second day that we spent on the Snæfellsnes peninsula. After a busy first day, there was plenty more to experience!

Our first planned stop in the morning was at a magnificent location: Kirkjufell, Icelandic for Church Mountain.

Kirkjufell Mountain

This 463 m high hill is located near the town of Grundarfjörður and is claimed to be the most photographed mountain in Iceland. This makes me wonder if that was before or after it was featured in Game of Thrones as “arrowhead mountain”; this was seen by the Hound and his band when they were north of the Wall busy capturing a wight.

Kirkjufell and Kirkjufellsfoss

There is also a wonderful set of waterfalls across the road from Kirkjufell, which are known as Kirkjufellsfoss. On this longer exposure to get the water to be more ribbon-like, you’ll notice that there are plenty of people crossing the falls.

The views here are stunning and I would love to go back here during the off-season to spend more time exploring the possible images, such as using the opportunity to get down lover by the waterfall to capture them from an even better angle.

The images in this post are taken with my iPhone 13 Pro Max and Canon EOS EOS R5 using a Canon RF24-105mm F4 L IS USM lens. First level processing of the images was done using Skylum’s Luminar AI software; for these images, I created a template based on the Backlit Clouds template that is part of the Overcast collection of templates. Touch up processing was done in Photoshop.