Out and About

3 May

Big Skies and Open Road

I don’t know how important music is to you or if you’ve ever bonded with someone through it but I’d be surprised (a) if it wasn’t and (b) if you hadn’t. It’s certainly part of the strong connection that I share with my two youngest sons, most recently as part of our Icelandic adventure.

I’m thinking back to the penultimate evening of our week long trip, as we were travelling west towards Reykjavik, listening to music in the hire car. Perhaps it wasn’t an adventure in the strict sense of the word but it felt like it. Tom was driving, I’d called ‘shotgun’ so Charlie was in the back for this leg of the journey, scrolling through Spotify on his phone, looking for our suggested songs.

We’d started the day a long way to the east, at Vestrahorn, where the twin peaks were shrouded in low lying cloud, fine rain and mist. From there we’d moved on to Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon, where the rain had persisted and the sky was still grey and overcast. Fortunately, by the time we’d got as far as the tongue of the Svínafellsjökull glacier, the weather had broken and we’d bathed in the light of glorious sunshine for a couple of hours before heading on once more. We were enjoying the music, we’d found somewhere to eat en route and the mood was good but photographically - for me - something was missing.

I love the open roads of Iceland but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’d asked Tom to pull over so I could get a shot, only to be told it wasn’t possible. The designated viewing points were few and far between but the views themselves just kept on rolling by. The open flood plains on this section of the south coast were among Tom’s favourite and whilst it may have felt liberating to behold these sights, it was really frustrating that I couldn’t grab meaningful shots such as the lichen covered lava fields or the bleak but beautiful black sands sub-framed by the mountains.

After journeying for a while, having searched and played a selection of tracks that started kind of dour but ended upbeat - Peter Gabriel’s soulful “I Grieve” fitting the bill perfectly - we pulled onto a short track that led towards a farm for a peepee break. It was here, having taken a picture of Charlie vaulting a gate, I decided that I might as well try my luck capturing more of the journey through the windscreen. Shooting at ISO 6400 in the fading light of evening is bound to create grainy images, the camera shake induced by the motion of the car isn’t very forgiving and the speckles of rain and dust on the windscreen didn’t help matters. Nevertheless… it was still worth a try.

For 41 minutes - accompanied by songs that fitted the mood - I clicked, clicked and clicked a selection of scenes of the open road as we headed past Vik to our overnight destination, hoping to capture how expansive the scenery felt in the deepening gloom. The shots ended up looking painterly, which was fine by me.