New Pictures – Page 5 – Photography by Philipp Lutz

Waterfalls, ice and gloomy atmosphere

The name of this waterfall (Godafoss in Icelandic) suggests a more epic story then there acutally is. It is said that after Christianity became the official religion of Iceland at around year 1000, lawspeaker Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði threw all his statues of the Norse gods into the waterfall when he returned from his duties in the national parlament of Iceland. At least I was hoping for a more dramatic story 😉

I think this glacier lagoon called Jökulsárlón was one of the most impressive scenes I’ve witnessed in Iceland. It’s so surreal and it always changes its look, only a few hours are enough and you get a completely different arrangement of icebergs, because there is a small channel which runs into the sea constantly drawing the icebergs into the sea. Especially during the quiet nights this place can be quite mysterious because of the cracking noise when icebergs break apart or when they run ashore.

This was one of these places we visited during the night just to be in time for the sunrise the next norming, little did we know how cool this place looks while arriving at around 11pm.
We were really surprised the next morning how cool these sanddunes and those gigantic mountains in the background looked like.

We were also surprised that this place was the only one we found in Iceland where we were supposed to pay 600kr just to drive on a sand road to get to the beach and the local lighthouse. The reasoning behind this “fee” was nature preservation, which I personally really doubted.

Waterfalls and Canyons

Iceland is full of natural wounds, two of them are waterfalls and canyons, there are just so many.

One of these rather popular canyons has a name which is really hard to pronounce, it’s called Fjaðrárgljúfur, one of my favorites (3rd image).

Epic moments in Iceland after the light faded away

This time I present you some pictures which have been taken when the daylight faded away already, in the case of Elusive Light you might be intrigued to think the warm light is coming from a sunset, but this is wrong, the warm light behind the rock results from a moonset during late dawn.

Due to a low population and a relatively high population density in the capital of Iceland (Reykjavik) there are no other big cities on Iceland which would produce much light pollution during the night.
Therefore when we had clear skies in Iceland we could always see plenty of stars across the sky.
Celestial Dreams was captured in a particular cold night at Dettifoss we were lucky to have very clear skies, we could see the milky-way in all it’s beauty even with our bare eyes. It was really fascinating to see a pitch-black sky (not kidding), with millions of visible stars, it felt like as if we could see into space because the sky was so dark.

More Icelandic beauty

Here are three more pictures of my (N)Iceland series 😉

We were really lucky to see aurora borealis (or simply northern lights) already on our first day after we arrived, we could see the aurora several times during our two week stay, but this was also the strongest aurora we ever experienced.