Travelling to Iceland

One of my big highlights this year was photographing this Iceland adventure session. I love travelling and exploring and have been fortunate to go to many amazing places. When I first started photography, I focused on landscapes, but eventually fell in love with integrating people into the scene. Now, including people in nature enhances the travel experience for me and encourages me to look at scenes in different ways. I often will be walking and will see a spot that would look perfect for a couple to be placed, or find a new hike and think about how fun it would be to visit again with people who love the outdoors as much as I do.

So when my bestie and I planned our trip to Iceland, I was excited to photograph a couple while I was there! Leuan and Leonie are currently living in Germany, but met while backpacking through Australia. Our schedules had a brief overlap so we planned on doing a session near Selfoss. Well, the weather had other plans! Iceland in March is unpredictable, to say the least! The day of the session was rainy and the wind was other worldly. We opted for the Kerid Crater (Kerið) instead to get away from the harsh conditions. Beside the water at the base of the crater (180 ft deep!) was perfect!

Kerid Crater Adventure Session

I do my best to practice Leave No Trace principles with my couples. For example, staying on paths instead of straying onto potentially fragile ecosystems, never going into restricted areas, and being mindful of other visitors. Safety is always the number one priority in sessions. You may notice adventure photographers taking amazing epic photographs in wild places, but a good photographer will never put their couple in danger. In this case, some of the crater lake had frozen over. In the photos, you can see the couple standing on ice. However, what you can’t see are the angles I took the photographs at to give the illusion of being farther out than they were, and the fact that the ice they are standing on is very close to the land and inches thick.

Iceland Adventure Session

Once we had spent a good chunk of time at the base of the crater, we decided to battle the wind and have the stunning Icelandic mountains as the backdrop for some images. The images from this Iceland adventure session are a lot more muted than my typical Ontario sessions, but it is important for me to edit photographs with true-to-life tones. And the more I looked at the scene, the more beautiful the layers of brown became. Pair that with the uniqueness of the red volcanic rock at this site and I believe it gives a true sense of this very special spot in Iceland.

This was an extremely memorable experience for me and I feel so lucky! Here is what Leuan and Leonie said about the experience:

My partner and I had an amazing time with Jess and her friend during their trip to Iceland. We were lucky enough to spend a few hours running around Kerið Crater having some absolutely amazing photos of us taken; she wasn’t at all afraid to go on a bit of an adventure.

Jess definitely made the whole experience easy, carefree and enjoyable, and we both came out the end of it with quite big smiles on our face. The photos she took and the experience we had will stay with us for a long time.

Liebe Große