Iceland for Photographers

A little over half an hour later, having crossed the neck of the peninsula to its open south coast, you reach the exact opposite kind of subject: a forgiving one. Búðakirkja is a small, pitch-black timber church standing entirely alone on a lava field at Búðir, no village left around it, just open coastline and a wall of mountains for a backdrop. The black is a traditional coat of pitch tar, and against snow, storm light or a low sun the silhouette does almost all the work for you, which is the genuinely rare part. Most Icelandic frames make you turn up at one specific hour and pray; this one photographs cleanly from every side and in nearly any weather, so the thirty minutes it takes are spent mostly on deciding which way you want the mountains to sit behind it, not on chasing light that might never arrive. And the loneliness in the shot isn't staged. The present church dates to 1848, rebuilt from nothing by the local community after the parish had been dissolved, so that solitary black box out on the lava is real history holding its ground, not a set.

Another twenty minutes along the same south coast brings Arnarstapi, where the peninsula stops offering you a single frame and hands over a whole coastline of them: sea arches, blowholes and rift channels cut into the basalt, with the Gatklettur arch as the signature and Mt. Stapafell standing up behind the village for a backdrop you didn't have to arrange. The huge stone statue of Bárður, the half-troll guardian spirit of the peninsula, straight out of the medieval saga, hands you a foreground subject that turns up with its own story already attached, which is more than most rocks manage. The easy coastal path toward Hellnar does the curating, stringing the best viewpoints one after another; walk it slowly with an hour in hand and you'll shoot the lot, the surf booming up through the blowholes somewhere under your boots. The catch is that none of it is fenced. The rock is loose in places and the cliff edges are abrupt, so compose from solid ground and keep well back from the drop, however much better the angle looks from the last half-metre of it.

Hvítserkur stands off the Vatnsnes peninsula, about 4 hours and 250 km from Snæfellsnes. The 15-metre basalt sea stack has two arches and a shape often compared to a dragon drinking from the fjord. Low tide reveals wet sand that can mirror the rock; high tide isolates it in the water. Allow about 45 minutes, check the tide before descending to the uneven beach, and watch for seals and nesting birds. Concrete reinforcement at the base helps preserve the formation.

The longest single haul of the trip comes next, and it's simply the price of the east: something like six hours and four hundred kilometres across the top of the country, from Vatnsnes over the north and down into East Iceland. Break it in Akureyri, the north's unofficial capital and the one town on this stretch big enough to sit you down to a proper meal and a bed, because doing the whole crossing in a single push is how photographs stop getting taken. Waiting at the far end is a frame that didn't exist a generation ago. Stuðlagil is a canyon walled floor-to-rim in dense hexagonal basalt columns, the Jökla river running through the bottom of it an electric, improbable turquoise in summer from suspended glacial silt, and those columns sat underwater and unseen until the Kárahnjúkar hydropower scheme diverted much of the flow in 2009. It was made almost entirely by photography: the Icelandic photographer Einar Páll Svavarsson popularised it after 2016, and it went from a canyon nobody had heard of to one of East Iceland's most-visited sites purely on the strength of the images. Shoot the classic view from the platform on the near side, or give it the couple of hours it takes to hike down and along the canyon floor for the columns up close, the river loud enough to fill the whole gorge. Just stay out of the water. It's powerful, it's off-limits, and it does not care how good the reflection looks from down there.

You'll have slept in Egilsstaðir, the hub of the east, and the next morning is mostly windscreen: close to five hours and better than three hundred kilometres south, threading the east fjords one headland at a time until the first glaciers slide into view on your right. The payoff is two signature frames a single road apart, which is almost greedy. On one side, Jökulsárlón, where the retreating Breiðamerkurjökull calves icebergs up to thirty metres high into Iceland's deepest lake and they drift, slow and blue and faintly cracking, toward the sea; on the other, straight across the road, Diamond Beach, where stranded chunks of that same ice sit glinting on black sand. The lagoon wants patience and a long lens as the bergs turn and roll and sometimes roll clean over; the beach wants a slow shutter and a low angle in the raking light of sunrise or sunset, an hour and a half between the two if you're disciplined about it. It has stood in for other worlds in two Bond films and Batman Begins. It is also the plainest marker of glacial retreat in the country: the lagoon has quadrupled in size since the 1970s, and every berg you frame here is a small piece of that arithmetic drifting out to sea.

Barely an hour further west, tucked into Skaftafell, is the tightest and most deliberate basalt composition on the whole list, and this is the one you have to walk for. Svartifoss is a 20-metre waterfall dropping over a black amphitheatre of hexagonal columns so compact you can fill the frame edge to edge with it, no wide vista to wrangle, just the fall and the geometry stacked behind it. These are the columns, as it happens, that gave Reykjavík the vertical fronts of Hallgrímskirkja and the National Theatre, so the shot runs on a direct line back to the capital's skyline. Earning it costs a moderate uphill hike of around five and a half kilometres round trip from the visitor centre, which is the good news: the climb thins the crowd down to something a landscape photographer can actually work in, unlike the roadside falls. Two things to watch on the way, both of them literal: fragments of column falling at the base, where the amphitheatre keeps quietly shedding itself, and wet rock underfoot on the descent, which is where people go over.

A bit over two hours west, the coast serves up the frame that is equal parts irresistible and genuinely dangerous, and you'll be working it out of Vík, the one town on this whole stretch of shore. Reynisfjara is the full south-coast basalt kit in one frame: black volcanic sand, a standing wall of hexagonal columns, the Hálsanefshellir sea cave, and the jagged Reynisdrangar stacks out in the water, which folklore files as two trolls caught by daylight while hauling a ship to land. It's endlessly composable, columns for a foreground, stacks for the distance, the cave as a frame inside the frame, and you can happily lose forty-five minutes moving ten metres at a time. The sea off this beach throws unpredictable sneaker waves off a submerged offshore ledge, and it has killed at least five people since 2007. Stay well back, never turn your back on the water, and obey the warning lights and closures. No photograph is worth ignoring them.

Twenty-odd minutes back west is the calm companion piece to all that adrenaline. Dyrhólaey is a 120-metre promontory capped by a 1927 lighthouse and named for the giant sea arch punched clean through its base, big enough, and this is true, that a small plane once flew through it. From the top the composition opens in both directions at once: east to the Reynisdrangar stacks you were shooting from sea level an hour ago, west along the black-sand coast running back toward Reynisfjara. That two-way sweep makes it one of the best single vantage points on the entire south coast, an hour well spent pacing the headland while the wind does its best to walk off with your tripod. It works in most light, but the version worth waiting for is a low sun raking along the shore, when the whole coastline turns to texture. (Birders come up here for the summer puffins; today the puffins are a bonus, and the arch is the point.)

The road ends in the highlands. Landmannalaugar lies close to three hours and a hundred and forty kilometres inland from the coast, with the final approach on seasonal F-roads and across streams that require a suitable vehicle. Rhyolite mountains banded in red, gold and green rise from the black Laugahraun lava field, about five hundred years old. A little elevation gives the colours and ridgelines room in the frame. Parking reservations have been required since 2024. Allow most of a day, then finish in the natural geothermal springs at the edge of the site.