Evening

On some evenings during long arctic sunsets, we look north out of the top-floor window of my parent's house and watch our local pyramid turn pink.

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GUEST PHOTOGRAPHER: Ed Sweeney

Ed writes: One of the many things I've come to love about Iceland is the architecture. The straight, simple design combined with the vibrant colors makes the perfect combination for me. Because of this affinity (perhaps obsession is a better word) a lot of my photos tend to contain random structures, mainly houses. I saw this lovely blue-green house with the deep red door and stair railings and blue posts as I approached from up the street and began pulling my camera out of my bag in anticipation of the picture I would instinctively take. To my surprise as I got closer, I noticed the equally colorful sock stuck to the post. It seemed to me to sum up my perception of the Icelandic people I'd encountered on my visit : very neat and put together but with a wry sense of humor when you spend the time to get a closer look.

 Ed was born in Boston and has been a resident of Massachusetts his entire life. He's a programmer in an application development group for the health care industry. He's been reading Iceland Eyes for a while now, and sent me a link to his Flickr photo album of his most recent trip to Reykjavik via Twitter. I invited him to choose a few of his photos and be a guest photographer.

About discovering Iceland, Ed says:

The idea to make the trip in 1999 came about somewhat coincidentally over the preceding New Year's holiday. While at a holiday party, my hostess friend mentioned that her parents had visited Iceland earlier in the year and they raved about it. All I knew about Iceland up to that point was that the capital was Reykjavík, Reagan-Gorbachev something-something, and something to do with chess. It piqued my curiosity, however, as an interesting and exotic place to visit.

After his boss randomly mentioning a great package deal with Icelandair a short time later, Ed decided to make the trip happen, and three months later he was "geared up and mounted on our Icelandic horses for a nice afternoon ride in the mist."

On our first day we witnessed mist, rain, hail, snow, and sun. Then later that night we saw the sun set somewhere around 11:00 p.m., in early April. And with that (and the ensuing, unbelievably fun 3-night stay that followed) I was hooked on Iceland for good. The country is beautiful and the people are as friendly as ever. What's not to love? I finally returned again in June of 2012 and have just booked my third trip, along with a couple of friends who will be first-timers, for April 2013.

It's always fun hearing about how people got here for the first time, and often it's exactly this kind of seemingly random yet serendipitous situation. And most often our visitors, like Ed, can't wait to come back for more : )

To see a few more of Ed's photos with his wonderful descriptions, go to the Iceland Eyes Facebook Page.  If you would like to share your own pics of our lovely island, just let me know ~ Maria Alva

Solstice

In Iceland it is also possible to find three-legged ginger cats hanging out by seaside football fields at midnight on the Summer Solstice. And young men dreaming of lands far, far away...

Puffin

GUEST PHOTOGRAPHER: Birgir Gilbertsson

Happy 17th of June Independence Day, Iceland! Today we have a guest photographer, Birgir Gilbertsson, an optometrist at Optical Studio in Smáralind who has an excellent eye for Icelandic nature!

Here's what he writes about this very pretty puffin photo:

This picture was taken out at Dyrhólaey and it was the first time I ever went there. There was a lot of Lundi there and they were so used to have people close to them, that they didn't even bother. This one bird was a little bit closer than the others and I crawled slowly towards him. I managed to get very close and was very exited about that, started taking pictures and got that great shot :)

I love the moments when you have your camera with you and you get "lucky"! 

I've never met Birgir, who is also a triathlete and an Ironman finisher in his spare time, but through a twist of fate where I mistakenly thought that he had taken a certain gorgeous photo* and contacted him to see if I could use it, we began a light correspondance. Since he is also into amateur photography, I thought it would be fun to have him share his work here. He sent me a few shots to consider, and when I saw this little lundi I knew it would fit right in here on Iceland Eyes : )

*The photographer who took this shot admits to having added Photoshopped in the water and the reflection in it of our Harpa concert hall. It's a stunning shot and well conceptualized, but not reality.

Blómadagur

Someone told me that it's Blómadagur, or Flower Day, again on Skólavörðurstígur, though I'll have to
go wandering about myself to find out how reputable my source is since I can't find anything on the interwebs to confirm it.

In the meantime, here's a reposting of a classic Iceland Eyes photo from June 2006. The original text read:

The Saturday before last was Flower Day in Reykjavik. I went for a stroll with Óðinn in his belly pack and noticed that just about every woman I passed on Skólavörðurstígur (the street leading up to the big church) held a rose in her hand. Valentína, who was holding a tombóla with Marsibil at the top of Skólavörðurstígur told me when I went to visit their enterprise (they made over $25 each that day!) that someone was handing out flowers to women downtown, though she didn't know who. I didn't make it far enough on my walk to find out, but I did see this charming group of people with their watering cans. It must have been an acting troupe....they were very cute and kind of pranced about watering things like parking meters and garbage cans. We definitely more of this type of urban attraction here in our little city!

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

Color

If you've been following Iceland Eyes for a while, you'll know that seeing our island macro-style is one of my passions. Here's some wonderful color to help you start your new June week

Beauty often displays in hidden places...
 

It's amazing what the inside of a classic tulip has to offer ~.~

Flight

I'm sure that a lot of you who've been here will get this picture, though maybe you'll find it as surprising as I did to see that it's a big huge Icelandair 757 buzzing the city center and not just a Fokker from Flugfélagið or a private jet that is coming in for a landing at the domestic airport which, of course, we're all used to.

I don't know if there was any specific reason why it landed in town instead of out at Keflavík, but don't be surprised when you visit if you hear the sound of an incoming plane. You might even make it a game to see if you can get an awesome belly shot as it zooms past overhead!*

*The best location for this is out at Hljómskálagarðinn by the town lake (link is to a photo and post by Professor Batty.) Oh, and here you can watch a live cam feed of Tjörnin, the town lake : ) 

Practice

Bear with us! We're freaking out again because of the weather. And no, not we as in me, personally, but as in the entire island nation. It's really cold! It's really windy! Roads are closed! Domestic flights have been cancelled and cars can't get into/out of parking spots! Snow has invaded the tops of our winter boots and we've lost our woolen mittens! An entire meter of the fluffy stuff has fallen and it's apocalyptic times here in this country named for ice. How will we ever survive? 

Well, since most of us have lived through this kind of thing before it shouldn't be too difficult. And according to my favorite weather site (click on a pic and scroll the timeline to watch the pretty colors change) it will warm up and all the impertinent snow will be turned to sludge by Friday midnight. Phew!

Another sweet thing to do, though, to keep warm here in winter is to experience Hot Yoga with Lana Vogestad who is a talented artist and amazing Barkan Method yoga instructor leading sessions at the World Class chain of gyms here in Reykjavik. They unfortunately don't have a site in English, but here's your chance to practice your Icelandic (that last link is an inside joke: Google Translate is not the definitive Icelandic language resource by any means) by checking out their verðskrá. If intensive, balancing, healing, rewarding, sweaty Practice is your thing, Lana's classes are an absolute must in any season.

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

Reflection

Some things that make us happy: good coffee and good books.

So I did a search on Iceland in G+ and of course got all sorts of lovely HDR mega-manipulated picture hits from über-superstar photogs (really, how can you snap a bad shot out in our amazing nature!) and also a tiny shout-out for a music festival I'd never heard of before. At first glance it looked to be all about death metal, but names can fool: the DMD, or Dark Music Days, event "can easily be summed up in one word: Diversity. Here, composers and performers from many different sectors of Icelandic music have been able to meet and cooperate while presenting their latest works."* It's happening next weekend, so if you are in the neighborhood, you might want to give it a whirl.

It's being held at our new Harpa which not everyone loves, but which I think is actually a stunning play of space and glass and light, reflecting nicely an aspect of our Icelandic people: seemingly cold, complex and overwhelming from the outside, but truly golden, strong-hearted, warmly intricate and multi-faceted on the inside ~.~

*Quote from www.darkmusicdays.is
Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

Synchronicity

Yeah, I didn't get it either. They were just there, in front of Hallgrímskirkja, these big black letters, begging me to snap a shot. So I did. And I had intended to write I have no clue what this is all about, but then I saw an article in Fréttablaðið (the daily free newspaper that I've requested not be shoved into my mailbox because life is kinder without being constantly slammed with hype and adverts every day, but which I'm subjected to anyway whenever a new delivery person takes our route, causing that phenomenon known as Middle Class Guilt because now I'm responsible for recycling inky garbage I never wanted in the first place! *sigh*) about the guy behind the word, one Santiago Sierra. He will be installing his stafir at Austurvellir in support of citizens' rights to democracy throughout the world, on this, the third anniversary of the loud and messy protests here in Iceland in the same town square.

On a lighter note, my father Thor and I have been invited to celebrate 70 years of diplomatic relations between the US and Iceland tonight by the US Ambassador to Iceland, Luis E. Arreaga (he has a blog!) at Nasa, a venue located at Austurvellir that some of you are familiar with from it's long lines during Iceland Airwaves (book your tix for 2012 now! They sell out mighty quick!)

Tonight we'll actually be entertained by local musicians who have done the Airwaves festival, LayLow and Of Monsters and Men (that link takes you to an NPR / KEXP shout out : ) who in this video are playing a song from their Airwaves Off Venue Reykjavík Downtown Hostel gig, produced by a very sweet and super talented DJ-Producer American friend of mine, Manny, whose last name is Santiago, like the NO artist's first name, and who interestingly enough was contacted by a long lost friend out in the States after he had seen Manny's Guest Photographer post here on Iceland Eyes. Incidentally, this photo of Manny's was taken at the Reykjavik Art Museum which is hosting the exhibition of which Sierra's NO is a part.

Nice synchronicity, eh?

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

Fairy

Maybe having seen so many fantastic creatures in the 13th of Christmas bonfire has opened my mind to perceiving the mythical in the most common objects, but regardless of why, once I spied the fairy made by lights in this tree in front of the Central Bank of Iceland I couldn't unsee her. Come to think of it, though, there's evidence to show that this is just the way I'm built, and I'm sure many of you as well. (Isn't this called anthropomorphization...and er, is that even a real word? Turns out it is!)

Regardless of what I see in these lights, I'm hoping that they and many others around town, will be kept lit through the next few months when, post-holidays, we definitely need them most.

On another note, producer Heather Millard (who did the excellent The Future of Hope documentary  - which I've mentioned before - with director Henry Bateman) sent me an email about an event she's helping to organize here with Kisha Mays, the CEO of Just Fearless, in Reykjavik on January 24th called Women Empowering Women. It looks like it could be a very cool evening of network building and support, so I think I'll go myself and take part. If you are here on the Lava Rock during that time you're welcome to come as well!

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

Brenna

In lieu of a nice shot of New Year's Eve fireworks, and to warm you up after yesterday's chilly post, I bring you a picture of dancing flames instead!


Here Óðinn adds fuel to the fire at last night's annual Þrettándinn, or Thirteenth Day of Christmas, celebration. For more photos of last night's bonfire, go ahead and visit this post on Google+ ( and you can add me to your circles too, if you'd like : ) This photo by my sister and/or her husband is pretty sweet too.


Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

Freeze

Let's not talk about the weather! But it has been exceptionally snowy so far this winter, with records set in late December and up until this morning a nice dry below zero (Celsius) windless cold that made the white stuff crackle, crunch and snap under foot. Not very good snowball weather (it would be like lobbing rocks studded with shards of glass) but supernice for long walks around town.

Anyone who has been here in late fall through to late spring knows how often the weather fluctuates in this region's ongoing power struggle between the north wind Boreas, or Kári as he's known to Icelanders, and the great Gulf Stream [video], how surprisingly warm it can be for a nordic island, and how moist the air generally is. That's a recipe for bone-chilling. These past few days I finally really appreciated what dry cold means!

Unfortunately what always happens way too soon happened this morning: the temperature rose above zero and rain is on it's way, equalling nothing less than tons of heavy, dirty slush for the foreseeable future (unless, of course it snap freezes again, creating a dangerous icy shellac over everything.) I'm glad Óðinn and I walked over the town lake yesterday in case it never freezes over again this winter.

It was pretty funny: turned out a bunch of visitors were unsure if they should go out onto the lake, and were just waiting for a local to step out on to the ice, so we had a trail of tourists in our wake. I slowed down and stopped before reaching the bridge because I wasn't sure if it was frozen there, and two British guys stopped too. "We're following you," they chuckled. "Well, I'm following him, and he's only five, so I don't know how good an idea that is!" I replied with a wink.

Regardless, we'll just don our woolens and wet gear and make the best of the season this weekend, whatever comes our way.

2012

It's nearly as hard starting again as it was saying goodbye to this site (which I did in late October as per the post below) but not because I don't want to! I've definitely been itching to snap pictures and share them for the past two months, but after such a dramatic exit, isn't it a little disingenuous to just slip back in the door as if nothing really happened?

I'm glad I stepped away, though, if just for some perspective. Without getting too deep, why we do the things we do really is as important as what we are doing, and ultimately this baby-of-mine makes me happy, especially because I'm able to share it with all of you.

So Happy New Year to you all from beautiful, frozen Reykjavik! Let's make this year, so loaded with mythological (and for some cultural) significance, one of humanitarian significance as well. Take best care of yourselves and glow with health and love...the rest will easily follow.

P.s. I didn't have a super fantastic photo to post tonight, so chose a picture I took in our backyard just to post something! It's colorful anyway, and has that ubiquitous corrugated iron Reykjavik is so renowned for. More better stuff soon, camera gods willing!

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

Bless

To capture the true soul of a thing is an eternal challenge, one that has plagued the human race for ages, or since at least we made the disconnect between ourselves and the natural world. We attempt in fantastic ways to represent the living experience in sand, in stone, in metal, on paper, in words and music and song, with the help of silicon and the billions of transistors that feed each gadget we've come to rely on. Still, in all of our search and creation we can never quite capture the essence of what it feels like to be alive in this world. Great artists die heartbroken, because their time is done, and the ever-elusive muses have left them with parched mouths and aged, grasping fingers, still restlessly twitching with that lifetime ache to recreate the essence of the heart of the Universe. But the Great Goddess takes back what she generously grants, and we succumb once more to the deep dark warmth of her, satisfied with a life well lived, or not.

I struggled for over a month to find a fitting image for this 600th post. Some few readers made suggestions but none seemed to do personal justice to this seven year long happy accident of a tribute to a city I love so much. Finally, it dawned on me that the only appropriate thing was to pay homage to the craft I've been granted by having this final post honor the Great Mother, here in her aspect as Pomona, Goddess of Fruitful Abundance, and pray that she will grace us all with her love and care during our time here on her Planet Earth. And we, in turn, will care for this city, this island, as the least we can do in humble homage.

Thank you all for the past seven years. It's been a great run, but when the love of craft and of merely creating for it's own sake becomes ego-bound, a thing that happens to so many of us in this for-profit, monetizing landscape, it's time to return again to the source. I'm very proud of what I've done, but only because I'm not a photographer. I'm just a girl with a tiny compact camera who points it at what makes her happy, and who writes what makes her heart sing. I'll step out of the race and let this site stand, and be a completed thing.  

Respectfully yours,

Maria Alva

Retrospect

In honor of my 599th post, I'm sharing the very first photo from my very first Iceland Eyes post on August 8th, 2004. Much has changed since then in all of our lives, but for me at least Iceland Eyes has remained a constant. Thank you to all of wonderful readers who wouldn't let me quit over the years. I dedicate this post to you!

p.s. Míó the cat is still alive, but has moved into a nice ground-level space under a deck on Baldursgata. He knows where we live now on Njálsgata but, coming from a long line of adventurers, has chosen the more rugged lifestyle conveniently located just behind the best fish restaurant in town ; )

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out.

Lava

Almost completely airborne in Heiðmörk

Our trip out to Heiðmörk and Búrfellsgjá yesterday was very hressandi in the early autumn winds and steel-colored skies. Supplied with bananas and Kókómjólk, Óðinn and I set off for the volcanic crater along a path through the 8,000 year-old lava field just east of Reykjavik. We didn't make it all the way to our end destination but had a super fun time lifting and climbing lava rocks and picking the few remaining blueberries along the path.

We stopped to eat at an overhang that was used for hundreds of years as a shelter, and which had been partially walled up long, long ago with flat stacked lava rocks sealed together over time with centuries-old moss. Banana done, I became obsessed with photographing macro shots of the lava walls in all their minute detail and spent the next twenty minutes or so noticing more and more intricacy in them, and less and less what my son was up to. When I finally gave up on trying to shoot millimeter-sized drops of water just as they were falling, I realized that Óðinn had been rearranging the ancient walls of the shelter to make a separate kitchen area for our new cave home. I stopped him just in time, before any major damage to moss and old lava walls was done. We laughed about it, and made all necessary repairs. It nearly became a true historical landmark fail!

All in all, another amazing outdoors adventure in Iceland : )

Macro-berry

Evening

Night begins to descend in earnest upon the northern latitudes after one more season of bright summer nights. We've recently had some amazing displays of aurora borealis here in Reykjavik due to recent intense sunspot activity and earthbound solar flare coronal mass ejections. It's also been just crispy enough late evenings to help out: it's usually agreed upon that the best auroras happen in colder weather.

We've actually had to (been able to!) delay digging our mittens and hats out of the backs of drawers, though, because of an unusually mild start to September, windless and with bright blue and sunny skies. I have a strange sense that our seasons have shifted somehow since this year's winter was a long, drawn-out and tired affair, spring barely noticeable at all and summer all too often grey and windy. And maybe they have: there are enough unusual natural events, weather and otherwise, happening across the globe these days to buy into the idea that our once-reliable seasonal, temporal and atmospheric indicators are not at all what they used to be. Things are changing, for sure. But until worlds fall apart we'll keep enjoying lovely autumn evening strolls through the streets of our pretty little city.

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

(Macro) Inspiration

Every writer knows those times when they feel that it's all been said before, or that someone is currently saying what they are inclined say in a well enough manner, so why be redundant? As far as our lovely Iceland is concerned, there are so many wonderful sources for current events and entertainment online (my facebook news feed alone is full-to-brim with amazing talent!) that it seems right to just let them do the talking in words and in pictures.

And after seven years and 596 posts, I sometimes wonder what compels me to keep on with this little hobby, which has become much more complex a package now that the social media tide has swept into our lives. I'm told by "experts" that to make anything of this site I'm to invite visitors to like/follow me in all sorts of different ways (see left, though I balked at creating an email list to spam you even more cleverly with, my dears.) And now the invisible pressure to do what the rest of the active universe is doing, i.e. tweeting, posting, emailing, G+-ing, and blogging has boggled this poor soul's mind.

I like to assume that you are all intelligent creatures, and that for you, like me, less is more. A few photos per post, succinct text with relevant links (though sometimes obscure if a site is really worth linking to) and a clean, uncluttered template is what I offer because it's what I look for in other websites. I've always tried to steer clear of repeating local/national news because I read most of it myself in an RSS reader or just Google 'Iceland news,' which I assume you all can/will do yourselves. Furthermore, I get that most of you won't even read this far because we live in the age of the Image. A pretty macro picture of 1cm long seashells on an Icelandic beach may make you pause for an appreciative instant before moving on to the next visual of our glorious existence here on post-millennial Earth, but you may not absorb more. I get that. It's what I often do.

So this writer is a pocket photographer with an uncanny, irrepressible urge to share with all of you. But maybe, because I'm from the pre-silicon solid-state-and-steel era, I become confounded by the myriad of mediums I am to use to communicate my simple photos and words.

Right now I am obsessed with macro shots of the delicate flora and fauna we pass by in our everyday lives, and I'm not sure that I would want to flood you with the incredibly small in every post. I do want to let you all know, though, that I have a few albums of life here in Reykjavik available for viewing via Picasa* and/or Google+, and that my soul is crafting slowly and with care my novel, which is a love letter to this island. I'll be sharing bits and vignettes in the near future. In addition, I will be posting to our facebook page though maybe sporadically for now.

 Thank you all for your patience and for your encouragement. It means a lot. Much love and grace to you all ~.~

*Here are three albums you might enjoy (please view them enlarged, starting with the first one : ) Secret Reykjavik, The Secret Life of Iceland, Ridiculously Beautiful Flowers, Iceland Poppy 

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

Color

On a simple evening stroll through our Skuggahverfi this amazing collaboration of colors made my day. I've been on a little late summer hiatus, but will continue bringing you more scenes from our pretty little city as we stretch into autumn. This, by the way, is my 596th post! Hard for me to believe...