Farewell to 2010

Twilight Clouds over Kleifarvatn, Iceland

So 2010 has passed... One more year, full with stories, some good, some bad, some interesting, some boring, but that's the way things go. If we didn't have rainy days, we wouldn't give so much importance to the sunny ones. That's a metaphor for life... As far as landscape photography goes, we'd better turn it around because I actually prefer rainy days to those sunny ones with clear blue skies...

Anyway, photographically it has been a great year. The highlight was of course the trip to Iceland in July. I had been wanting to go back ever since I went there for the first time in 2007, and what a trip it was. This time I prepared the trip better than last time and it payed off nicely.

I had talked with some Icelandic photographers trying to know what were the best spots to see the amazing light show that was provided by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano and even though I was too late for that, speaking to landscape photographer Orvar Thorgeirsson and visiting him at his gallery in Reykjavik was great. Apart from being able to check out his wonderful work, he gave me some great tips about several places that I wouldn't have been able to discover on my own.

I visited one of these places on my first day in Iceland. Kleifarvatn is a lake near Reykjavik, that provided me with one of the best sunsets I have experienced in my life. I arrived there at about 10:30 pm and there was no one there. There was great light everywhere. I literally did not know where to point my camera. On one side there was a small mound lit up by the reddish light of sunset, on the other there was the lake with beautiful clouds above that were colored pink as the sun went lower on the horizon. And the best thing is that there was no one there, I had the place to myself, so I ended up staying until almost 1 in the morning... The beauty of Icelandic twilight in the summer: great sunset light doesn't happen very often, as there are still lots of clouds and sometimes all you get is grey skies, but when it does it lasts for hours.

I share with you now one of my images from that twilight. The composition is pretty basic, but if there's one travel moment that I will remember from this last year, it's those huge pink clouds over the lake as the sun was setting. It may sound strange, but it almost seemed that Iceland was welcoming me back...

Happy 2011 everyone ! :)