Kirkjufellsfoss or the Church Mountain waterfalls.

This was the day of my arrival in Iceland. My girlfriend @chaosgeek and I were pretty tired from the flight from Montreal but also hyped about being in Iceland. One of the first few spots we had in mind for that day was Kirkjufellsfoss. In Icelandic, from what we observed, names are very descriptive. Kirkjufellsfoss is 3 words: Kirkju which means church, fjall which means mountain and finally foss for waterfall.

Obviously we were not alone on this majestic site. Hordes of photographers were lining up everywhere. A lot of them up the waterfall trying to copy that same picture that they had already seen on the internet. I'm pretty sure they all had nice photos but I wanted to get my own. I wanted a picture that I could be proud of and that would be different, at least to some degree, than those of everyone else.

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A thing that I had learned with my landscape workshop with Chris Collacott and One of a Kind Photography is that to get that extra shot, sometimes you have to take some risks. I don't encourage anyone taking unnecessary risks, but if the risk is small and I don't risk injuring myself badly, I'll take it. For this shot, I had to walk on thin ice to get to the spot for the point of view that I wanted. Water was shallow so the worst case scenario was getting soaked in ice cold water.

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Did not have to wait very long because when we got there, the sun was already low on the horizon. Got there, put the camera on the tripod, took my shot and it was done. I was able to capture both the waterfall and the mountain at the same time. This was shot with a Nikon 20mm f1.8
I wish I had the budget for a wider lens like the 14mm but I might get the cheap Rokinon one day.

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On this one, you can see where I was standing for the other shot. I was in the corner almost under the waterfall. I like to try different point of views while I'm shooting landscape. Sometimes when you keep trying, to eventually catch something that gives you an idea for a better shot.

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On the way back to the minivan, I came across a little pond of water and wanted to try to take a shot of the mountain with it's reflection. Since there was not so many things around to try and make a composition, I decided to frame the mountain dead center. How does this work?

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After we got back to the van, we were heading our way to our next location but we were so tired that we decided to stop in a parking lot for a little powernap. When I woke up, I told my sweetie @chaosgeek that I thought I was seeing auroras. I took a shot with my camera in the parking lot just to be sure and when I saw those celestial green lines appear on the LCD, we took off and went back to the mountain again for that one last shot. It was the only auroras we would see in the entire week that we were there. They were a bit faint but still glad that I had the opportunity to take that shot.