Here are a few whale hunters.

There was still a little snow and frost on the ground on this early morning when I walked around Reykjavik to get some shots. It was one of of those days I was happy to wake up before sunrise. The cloud cover was perfect for surreal HDR time!

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During the middle of winter, there was not a lot of light during the day, but the dusk seemed to last for about two hours. So it was very nice to get the strange deep blue light in so many of my shots. I think it really came out as a nice backdrop color for all the warm colors and architecture in and around Reykjavik.

This was shot a bit after sunset at the docks in Reykjavik. The boats were rolling in with the sweet scent of whale, our friends from the sea, opened up an blubbering all over the place. I think the ships get so heavy and full-o-whale, that they keep a fleet of these tugs handy.

Beneath the picture of the tug boat is a picture that I sensationally called an Icelandic Battleship. Of course, it is nothing of the sort. It’s merely a Dutch Coast Guard ship, but it looked fairly imposing in the cramped Reykjavik harbor.

This is a portion of the Blue Lagoon in Iceland just after dusk. The water was a hot and steamy milky-white, filled with all kind of nutrients and minerals. At this time of night, there was hardly anyone inside, so I felt like less lecherous walking around a swimming pool with my camera.

This is Hallgrimskirkja, and I think this is the coolest church I have ever seen. I could not find a bad angle for this thing. The shape seemed to be pleasing to my math sense from whichever direction I composed the shot.

I have posted a shot of the interior underneath. I call it “The Haunting Hull of the Viking Longboat” or somesuch. I forget this grandiloquent names over time, but it was something to that effect.

I enjoyed exploring the wiles of Iceland on this strangely-clouded day. It made for idyllic settings for ruin-hunting. I always expected to find Eric the Red’s skeleton inside, holding a few gold coins and a treasure map, but nothing of the sort happened. In fact, all that happened was I got back into a leather-seated car and ate a Snickers bar.

I knew if I took enough HDR pictures of churches that I would eventually get a miracle. You know, the odds are technically and scientifically in my favor. The sound the miracle made was about the same sound as when they hit that emergency switch in the hatch on Lost.

This one was a five-exposure HDR. The cloud streaks were subtle, but nice, and the tone mapping certainly helped them to pop.

This was taken from inside the cemetery, whose egress was made through this nice little white gate.

Is Iceland the coolest place on Earth? Yes.

Where else can you find things like this, frozen in time, preserved in an earthen mound under the frigid tundra… this old viking longboat, stored in perfect condition, still lit by wall torches, and used as an inverted church. What a place…

I found a nice bench and sat there for about an hour, drinking coffee, with my hand on the remote control. Oh, here come some more birds… snap snap… have some coffee… look there’s the sun… more birds now… snap snap snap… coffee is good… better increase that ISO those birds are fast… look at those clouds… more birds… snap snap… is this place real? snap… omg how am I going to process all these pictures… snap snap… thank god I have a lot of memory cards…. okay now the sunrise is even better… why did I waste those earlier shots? More birds… go slower please birds.. snap… coffee running low… okay time to move on I have a meeting soon… okay one more snap.

Hewn from stone, the temple spire awaits my approach, making my chest rattle with thunder.

This is Hallgrímskirkja, a church in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland. It is built to resemble an ancient area of the countryside, near a waterfall, where stones in these shapes were found as part of a natural geological formation.

The Large Version of this looks cool.

I made it to Iceland! I only had a few minutes of daylight, so I ditched my bag in my room, threw on six layers of scarves, and headed down to the harbor.

This isn’t really a battleship. Iceland does not face many threats from the sea, except for when Greenland runs low on whales.