The turf house
A single turf house sitting on its own in the interior. No road leading to it and nothing else around — just the house, a picnic bench next to it, and open land in every direction. From above, what stood out was how much empty space there was around it. The house is maybe a metre and a half tall and looks tiny against everything else. The clouds were coming in fast, so I got a few frames and brought the drone back down.
Aurora
I’d been checking the aurora forecast every night. On this one the KP index was high enough and the clouds cleared after midnight. I walked out to a stream I’d noticed earlier in the day — I wanted some water in the foreground for the reflection. The aurora came up slowly and then filled most of the sky, and the green showed up in the water too. I set the camera on the tripod and watched it for a while before I started shooting.
Alone on the road
Shot from directly above the road, looking straight down. Fresh snow had covered everything — the road, the fields, the hills on both sides and then this one white van came through, moving slowly. The tyre tracks are the only marks in the frame. I like how you lose any sense of scale here; the van could be on any road in any snowy place. This one happened to be Iceland.
Jökulsárlón
Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon. The icebergs break off the Vatnajökull glacier and drift through here before heading out to sea. The ice has a deep cyan colour that comes from years of compression pushing the air out. The sky was grey and heavy, which made the ice stand out more.
Hvítserkur
Hvítserkur, on the Vatnsnes peninsula. It’s a 15-metre basalt sea stack, and the arch at the base makes it look a bit like an elephant or a dinosaur drinking from the sea. I got there at low tide and could walk right up to it. Up close the rock is covered in moss and barnacles. The land around it is flat in every direction, so it’s a little odd to see it standing there on its own.
Dettifoss
Dettifoss — Europe’s most powerful waterfall by volume, around 200 cubic metres of water per second going over the edge. The water is grey-brown from glacial sediment and you can hear it from a long way off. I used a long exposure to smooth it out a bit. The mist was constant, and I went through a whole pack of lens wipes keeping the front element dry.
The pass
A road cutting through a mountain valley, shot from above. Snow on the peaks and across the valley floor, with patches of golden-brown tundra coming through. The clouds were breaking up and letting some light down in places. The road runs off into the distance and you can’t see what’s past the pass, which was enough to make me put the drone up and hold it there for a while.
Storm warning
While driving back, the sky started doing this — warm orange and pink colors from the sunset, and a wall of dark cloud coming in from the west. The road ahead was snow-covered and empty apart from one car maybe half a kilometre away. I pulled over and had two or three minutes before the cloud came over. The fence posts running into the distance, the farmhouse on the hill, and the single car all lined up on their own.