This photo tour with Iurie Belegurschi had a busy first day — culminating in success on a key goal. We had never seen the Aurora Borealis (aka Northern Lights) before, and scheduled this trip specifically to have a chance at them.  It has been raining for days, and no chance for them until tonight. Weather was bad, but Iurie took us out anyway — and a clearing in the clouds allowed us to see them!  Rather faint, and in an area with boring foreground, but we can now say we have seen them. Chalk one more item off our bucket list! 🙂The day started with no real chance of a sunrise photo, when suddenly the clouds parted and the sun gave an indication of the day we were about to have — our first without constant rain since we arrived in Iceland 5 days earlier.  Our first stop was the Seljalandsfoss waterfall we walked behind, then Skogafoss waterfall.  Both were fairly impressive, though I must admit that waterfalls are not high on my target list.

Clouds and rain covered us again as we moved to the Reynisfjara beach to reluctantly photograph waves crashing on the basalt shore. We learned a valuable lesson though — even in bad weather, there’s always something to photograph. You can look for patterns and turn an image into a powerful black and white photograph. We had 12 photographers along, and we traveled in a plush full sized bus, giving each of us a seat, so we could spread out our gear between stops.

As the sun went down (at 4:45PM this far North), we stopped to catch the sunset.  It didn’t look hopeful, as there was solid cloud cover — until just minutes before sunset, when the clouds cleared just enough to give us some nice color and variation to the sky.