Iceland’s in my head

I’m having a hard time coming back down to earth. Work took extra concentration this week. I’m seeing mountains. The landscape seems mismatched here. Where’s the sea, just around that curve? Oh, wait… I’m no longer in Iceland.

I still don’t know how to sum up the trip. The details seem fuzzy already. My friend Jane and I landed in Keflavik on the last Monday of September, traveled first south and then east and then north and west and then back to Reykjavik and left the first Monday of October.

I took only film cameras, and I love the resulting colors I got on these initial rolls.

I can still feel the mist from the waterfalls. I can still see the mountains in the distance. I can conjure up the sulfur-y smell of the thermal pools. The stoic horses, the mighty wind, the pelting rain, the sudden rainbows. Who could stand in sight of these things and not be moved, or fundamentally changed?

 

There were bumps, like our baggage leaving the airport with someone else (but fortunately coming back before we left the car rental); a punctured tire that fortunately got resolved quickly because we were lucky enough to be in a town with a tire shop; misguided directions from Google maps that put us quite off-course a few times; house spiders that didn’t bother my travel companion, but that tested my spider-tolerating capabilities. The rest of it, though–a tomato-lentil soup with big hunks of crusty farm bread in a cozy coffee shop; the snowy mountain pass; the spectacular sunset one evening; the sea spray and the mossy rocks and just the surprises the landscape offered around every curve–all of this is firmly implanted in my psyche.

Maybe I’m waxing poetic because I’m not so well-traveled, but it all makes me ache for more. I can’t wait for the next adventure. I can’t wait to see the next mountain range or seaside cliff. I can’t wait to feel the air and the wind and the water of the next place. I can’t wait to be changed again. Until then I’ll keep looking at my pictures and remembering how I felt when I was there.

I shot 16 rolls of film. Six 35mm rolls and 10 120mm rolls. I wish I’d shot more, and gone a little more slowly and patiently. But, the wind and the cold were more of a factor than I expected. I wrote and took notes but even those got chaotic, and so now I’m not sure where I was for some of these photos. Whatever. I was madly in love with everything. Not much else matters when you’re swooning, does it?

I’m still waiting for five more rolls, so I’ll write more and share those photos soon. The photos in this post were taken on a Minolta SRT-102 (my favorite camera), a Bronica SQ-A (my other favorite camera), and an FPP Debonair–a $20 plastic camera that I used for the first time on this trip and that I think is actually really terrific. The films reflected in this post are Kodak Portra (160 and 400 ISO), Kodak Ektar (100 ISO), and a Kodak Gold (200 ISO) I soaked in grapefruit-habanero kombucha, which made for some subtle color shifts and some streaks; more subtle than I expected but I still like it.

If you’re interested, you can see more from these 11 rolls on this flickr album.