Hello Shetland fans! Now that Frances has gone for her operation she has handed the reins over to me to do my best to keep you interested while she is away. Living, as I do, 600 miles from Shetland, I am unable to regale you with anecdotes of animal related antics in the same way your regular hostess has done in the past, but as a photographer with a fondness for Iceland, there may be something of interest I can share with you.

My most recent visit to Iceland was for the Iceland Airwaves festival in October/November 2012, where I was photographing for The 405, a young but increasingly popular music website with whom I cut my teeth as a music photographer during 2011 before deciding to concentrate on more commercial photography.

We arrived to scenes of calm seas and snowy mountains.

Before paying a visit to the smallest venue in town

In the evening, a selection of local bands were playing at a much larger venue where, in typical crazy Icelandic style, one of the bands (called Prinspóló) handed out paper hats to the crowd:

Before being followed by Sin Fang and their unusual home-made effects boxes:

Rounding off the night were FM Belfast (who are not a radio station and are not from Northern Ireland) who finished their set, as they always do, in their underwear:

Working the crowd into a frenzy as they went

However, the reason I’m telling you all this is that on the Sunday after the festival, after the Epic Wind of Death blew through town, lifting people off their feet and generally causing chaos throughout the city of Reykjavík, the weather miraculously cleared and I was able to hire a small Cessna and pilot to fly over some of Iceland’s stunning landscapes.

I arrived at the airport beneath clear blue skies:

…before being shown to our carriage:

..which needed a quick top-up:

It wasn’t long before we were airborne, over lava fields:

… cracks in the earth (this particular one is the plate boundary between Europe and North America):

… frozen islands:

… and ribbons of meltwater from a nearby glacier:

An extinct volcano was a breathtaking sight:

… while, further south, a glacial river made abstract shapes across the barren landscape:

… before flowing into the North Atlantic ocean.

On the approach back to Reykjavík I got one last look at the mountains to the south west.

If I weren’t planning to do it again, for longer and further afield, I would have described it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, however it only served to further fuel my hunger for more and now I just need to wait for the time, and the funds, to return.

Thanks for reading – I will try to keep up Frances’s rate of posting as best I can.

Nick

(Mandatory gratuitous plug: if you want to buy prints of any of the aerial photographs, you can from this page. If you want to save 15% on your first order, just use the discount code MYSHETLAND at the checkout.)