Iceland on film (winter 2024 edition)

If you’ve been around this blog for long, you probably know I like to take film photos. I possess a wonderful 1960s SLR camera which turned up in the loft some ten years after its previous owner, my grandad, died. But it’s too heavy to carry around, so most of my photos are actually taken on the cheapest, simplest, most basic plasticky film camera where the only setting you can change is whether the flash is on or off (it’s off. Permanently). But because I was doing a badge, when I was in Iceland last year I took a roll of black and white film with me instead of colour – because if you’re going to be a revolting hipster taking film photos at all, why not turn it up to eleven by doing it in monochrome?

Me in full digital colour (well, a bit silhouetted against the white sky) taking a selfie with my yellow plastic film camera. You'll have to imagine for yourself what it looks like to take two selfies simultanously.

That’s not one of them. That’s just a selfie of taking a selfie. Yes, a camera in both hands, both pointed at me from different angles. That’s what my film camera looks like, in case you were imagining something a bit more vintage and later on, you’ll see the picture I took in that moment.

The view down towards Hvammsvik on the shores of the Hvalfjordur.

A view down into Hvammsvik's beach pools with the sheer wall of snowy mountain enclosing the southern side of the fjord behind it.

One of Hvammsvik's hot pools with the fjord and the steep mountains behind it.

A pool at Hvammsvik. The photo is taken quite low to the water, showing the fjord beyond between a gap in the boulders that line the pool.

First up, a batch taken at Hvammsvik. I’d normally keep my GoPro for this but I came and fetched the film camera about fifteen minutes before I had to get out and I made a point of keeping it on the rocks on the other side of the pool in between pictures. It’s just a plastic box. It can survive a couple of wet fingerprints. On the whole, to be honest, Hvammsvik maybe isn’t the best subject for black and white film photos. I’m not even entirely sure what I was taking a picture of in the first one. The reflections in the water are nice but the rocks are just too dark to really work.

The view from the beach at Hvammsvik towards the little island off the coast and the mountains that enclose the fjord.

A view over Hvammsvik from the top of the little ridge behind it. You can see the mountains along the fjord but Hvammsvik itself is a bit too dark to identify.

A couple of pictures around Hvammsvik – one of the little island out in the fjord as seen from the beach and one of the Hvammsvik complex from the ridge above it as we waited to go back to the bus. These work a bit better – broader landscapes with a little more contrast, like the water and the snowy mountains, seem to be better than closer-up pictures of black rocks.

Barnajfoss, a river bubbling furiously through a narrow course more like a very narrow open-topped canyon.

A view down to the other side of the river at Hraunfossar, where a few tourists can be made out looking at the river from the snowy path.

These two are from around Hraunfossar and Barnafoss, further up the valley to the east of Hvammsvik a day later, two interesting waterfalls. Hraunfossar is where water pours from the lava field straight into the river rather than from any visible surface water source and Barnafoss is kind of like a horizontal waterfall, where the river is deep and narrow, like the very beginning of the birth of a canyon. It means it rushes a lot in a slightly horrifying way, especially when you cross it on the rickety bridges.

A field of snow stretching out into the distance. In the foreground, some of the rough lava underneath has been partly uncovered.

A view of a small mountain beyond a field of snow.

A selfie in the snow field. I'm dressed for the cold and for caving, with a helmet over my woolly hat.

These three are from the walk across a snowy field from basecamp to the entrance to Víðgelmir, marketed as The Cave. These were pretty good, although film cameras are a long way from ideal for selfies. This is the picture I was taking in the colour photo at the top of this post!

The side of Harpa, the opera house/conference centre in Reykjavik, its many glass panels mostly quite dull in shades of grey with only a handful catching the winter light.

Hallgrimskirkja, a church inspired by basalt columns but looking a bit like a grey Space Shuttle, standing out against the afternoon sky.

A close-up of a timetable on a bus stop in Reykjavik with relatively high-rise buildings (by Icelandic standards) behind it.

Sundhollin, the Art Deco-style swimming pool in Reykjavik with Christmas trees and lights over the old main door and a sprinkling of snow outside.

The tourist bus stop on the side of the road at Snorrabraut, with a queue of traffic waiting at the lights on the other side.

Snorrabraut, one of the main thoroughfares through Reykjavik, with traffic turning right at the lights.

Two large tour buses waiting at the BSI station. Behind them, cranes are building an extension to the hospital.

A few from around Reykjavik, on a day that was clearly a bit too cloudy for these pictures to really work. Hallgrimskirkja isn’t bad, in that the grey church against the light midday sky stands out really well but you can’t see a whole lot of detail on the church itself.

A view across the bay at Reykjavik to Esja, who's just a bit too clouded right now for its snow to reflect.

The Sun Voyager, a stainless steel stylised Viking ship, standing proud in front of the bay and the gleaming snows of Esja opposite.

A view of Esja, the snow on top of the mountain glinting in the winter sun, behind Reykjavik spread out below and the bay.

And the Esja collection, Reykjavik’s mountain on the other side of the bay. Putting something sharp and dark, like the Sun Voyager sculpture, against the sky works well in black and white and I do like how you can see the sun gleaming on the snow from the picture taken from Hallgrimskirkja’s tower.

On the whole, although Iceland can be a bit of a monochromatic winter wonderland in winter, it’s not really light enough to get good film photos, especially not in black and white and especially not using a camera with zero settings you can adjust. I enjoyed the experiment and I do think some of the pictures came out pretty well but I’ll be sticking to colour film in future.