On the Beach of Midnight Gems
Sometimes, just now and again, you experience something you know is going to stay with you for the rest of your days. Something that elevates a good moment into one that will remain emblazoned into your soul until time carries you away. I’ve had some fantastic adventures since I took up landscape photography. At the start of this journey I never imagined how buying a camera of the non point and shoot variety and an accompanying clutch of lenses would change my life, and how it would make me dream of places I’d never taken much notice of before. Places like this.
There are three such memories, collected along the last few years that stand out, hopefully waiting to be joined by quite a few more. It wasn’t necessarily the quality of the images I smuggled away on the back of my SD cards, but just the feeling of being lost in the moment in places that left my jaw on the floor and delivered everything I’d hoped for in those dreams and more. The first happened on top of a Scottish mountain one February morning in 2018, when Dave, Lee and I followed in the footsteps of Tom Heaton and photographed Buachaille Etive Mor on a snowy sunrise morning. We punched the sky with smiles as wide as Glencoe and congratulated ourselves on having been rewarded for all of the planning and effort that went into just being there, on a mountain so far from home before dawn on a winter’s morning. The third happened just last September, when the black church of Budir sat beneath a swirling pink sky that still defies belief – even though it’s printed on aluminium acrylic and occupies the number one position on the wall right next to me as I write this tale. A group of Portuguese photographers on a workshop were applauding and chattering excitedly just out of shot. We all follow each other on Instagram nowadays, and we still regularly share shots from that incredible evening. Nobody who was there is in any doubt that we’d witnessed something very special.
And in between those elevated moments, in July 2019 I found myself alone on Diamond Beach at midnight. The sun had very briefly set over Jokulsarlon behind me as I faced out to sea, chasing chunks of ice that shone like gems in the dusky glow which never gives way to darkness in Iceland at this time of year. Up until now, it had been a disappointing day on that race around the ring road of a week. We’d spent the previous night at Eystrahorn and woken to a grey morning with almost no visibility and a permanently hidden mountain range that refused to show itself. Moving on to Vestrahorn we’d had the same problem, this time paying nine hundred krona each for the privilege of seeing absolutely nothing at all. A blanket of low cloud stuck rigidly to the ranges we’d spent an entire year fantasising about, and so we moved on with our tails between our legs and gloomy expressions on our faces.
But then later we arrived at Jokulsarlon, and things began to brighten up. Well apart from the fish and chip van being closed they did at any rate. After an hour at the lagoon we made our way down to the famous black sands, where a veil of soft rain played on our backs all evening, gradually soaking us to our very insides. Yet I barely noticed. Here I was, on a beach of a billion possibilities, lost at play among the icy boulders that lapped the shore. There was no special light, and many of you have come away with far better images. But it matters not, because this was one of those elevated moments on the beach of midnight gems. Everything that had happened over the difficult twelve months before I’d arrived at Keflavik that summer was lost, carried away on the endless sea as I was drawn further and further into my own little world on this extraordinary stretch of coastline in the country that haunts me in my sleep. Lee had long since retired to the van for the night, but I felt as if I could stay here forever, or at least until either the SD card was full, or the camera batteries were exhausted. What a place to wait for the water to streak back down the shore in front of you.
As time went by, each of my subjects changed shape, or washed out to sea, or was joined by others as I looked for clean compositions with distinctive clear pieces of ice. This one, shaped like a beached sea creature was a particularly fine specimen, grabbing the limelight for more than forty clicks of the shutter as I tried to capture the moment. I can’t decide whether it’s a seal or some giant fish, up from the depths of the ocean. Can you see the head, the eye, and the tail?
Eventually, dripping with rain and full of excitement I headed back to the van for a night’s rest before the long trek west to Vik the next day. Just like in “The Snowman,” another tale of magical happenings under northern skies, I woke the next morning and peered out of the window of the van towards the beach. Not an iceberg in sight. Just as if they’d never been there at all, or only in a dream.
And that’s how those elevated moments feel to me. Did they really happen? Well, I guess the photos tell me that yes, they did, yet I look back on each one as if I was watching myself from the outside, totally absorbed and completely happy, whether or not the pictures shattered the earth. When and where the next one will come from, I’ve really no idea, although it’s not lost on me that two of them have happened in Iceland. For now I’ll keep on dreaming, and waiting for one of those reveries to deliver another moment to remember forever.
Magical Mountain Morning: www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/51857786796/in/album-...
The Big Pink Sky Show: www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/52380684960/in/datepo...
On the Beach of Midnight Gems
Sometimes, just now and again, you experience something you know is going to stay with you for the rest of your days. Something that elevates a good moment into one that will remain emblazoned into your soul until time carries you away. I’ve had some fantastic adventures since I took up landscape photography. At the start of this journey I never imagined how buying a camera of the non point and shoot variety and an accompanying clutch of lenses would change my life, and how it would make me dream of places I’d never taken much notice of before. Places like this.
There are three such memories, collected along the last few years that stand out, hopefully waiting to be joined by quite a few more. It wasn’t necessarily the quality of the images I smuggled away on the back of my SD cards, but just the feeling of being lost in the moment in places that left my jaw on the floor and delivered everything I’d hoped for in those dreams and more. The first happened on top of a Scottish mountain one February morning in 2018, when Dave, Lee and I followed in the footsteps of Tom Heaton and photographed Buachaille Etive Mor on a snowy sunrise morning. We punched the sky with smiles as wide as Glencoe and congratulated ourselves on having been rewarded for all of the planning and effort that went into just being there, on a mountain so far from home before dawn on a winter’s morning. The third happened just last September, when the black church of Budir sat beneath a swirling pink sky that still defies belief – even though it’s printed on aluminium acrylic and occupies the number one position on the wall right next to me as I write this tale. A group of Portuguese photographers on a workshop were applauding and chattering excitedly just out of shot. We all follow each other on Instagram nowadays, and we still regularly share shots from that incredible evening. Nobody who was there is in any doubt that we’d witnessed something very special.
And in between those elevated moments, in July 2019 I found myself alone on Diamond Beach at midnight. The sun had very briefly set over Jokulsarlon behind me as I faced out to sea, chasing chunks of ice that shone like gems in the dusky glow which never gives way to darkness in Iceland at this time of year. Up until now, it had been a disappointing day on that race around the ring road of a week. We’d spent the previous night at Eystrahorn and woken to a grey morning with almost no visibility and a permanently hidden mountain range that refused to show itself. Moving on to Vestrahorn we’d had the same problem, this time paying nine hundred krona each for the privilege of seeing absolutely nothing at all. A blanket of low cloud stuck rigidly to the ranges we’d spent an entire year fantasising about, and so we moved on with our tails between our legs and gloomy expressions on our faces.
But then later we arrived at Jokulsarlon, and things began to brighten up. Well apart from the fish and chip van being closed they did at any rate. After an hour at the lagoon we made our way down to the famous black sands, where a veil of soft rain played on our backs all evening, gradually soaking us to our very insides. Yet I barely noticed. Here I was, on a beach of a billion possibilities, lost at play among the icy boulders that lapped the shore. There was no special light, and many of you have come away with far better images. But it matters not, because this was one of those elevated moments on the beach of midnight gems. Everything that had happened over the difficult twelve months before I’d arrived at Keflavik that summer was lost, carried away on the endless sea as I was drawn further and further into my own little world on this extraordinary stretch of coastline in the country that haunts me in my sleep. Lee had long since retired to the van for the night, but I felt as if I could stay here forever, or at least until either the SD card was full, or the camera batteries were exhausted. What a place to wait for the water to streak back down the shore in front of you.
As time went by, each of my subjects changed shape, or washed out to sea, or was joined by others as I looked for clean compositions with distinctive clear pieces of ice. This one, shaped like a beached sea creature was a particularly fine specimen, grabbing the limelight for more than forty clicks of the shutter as I tried to capture the moment. I can’t decide whether it’s a seal or some giant fish, up from the depths of the ocean. Can you see the head, the eye, and the tail?
Eventually, dripping with rain and full of excitement I headed back to the van for a night’s rest before the long trek west to Vik the next day. Just like in “The Snowman,” another tale of magical happenings under northern skies, I woke the next morning and peered out of the window of the van towards the beach. Not an iceberg in sight. Just as if they’d never been there at all, or only in a dream.
And that’s how those elevated moments feel to me. Did they really happen? Well, I guess the photos tell me that yes, they did, yet I look back on each one as if I was watching myself from the outside, totally absorbed and completely happy, whether or not the pictures shattered the earth. When and where the next one will come from, I’ve really no idea, although it’s not lost on me that two of them have happened in Iceland. For now I’ll keep on dreaming, and waiting for one of those reveries to deliver another moment to remember forever.
Magical Mountain Morning: www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/51857786796/in/album-...
The Big Pink Sky Show: www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/52380684960/in/datepo...