Category: Non classé

Iceland – Day 2

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We didn’t have a very precise plan for the beginning of the day today; we had plans for the middle/late afternoon, though, but we kind of made plans as we went before then.

Pierre went for a run before breakfast; he came back and pondered whether he wanted to have something more than his shorts in the current weather. We decided we’d go have a look and that it would be one of our morning missions.

But first, breakfast – fairly unremarkable (quite good though, and surprisingly good bread), apart from the tiny shelf of board games that Pierre noticed:

A Fortnite Monopoly and an Axis&Allies box: some choices have been made, but it’s unclear how 😛

After breakfast, we went to Ice Wear to try to find running leggings for Pierre, and we found something! Interestingly, this is the same shop chain where he had bought a beanie hat 9 years ago (and he’s still traveling with this hat 🙂 )

Then it was time to go and explore. We knew there was a lighthouse not very far, so we went to see the lighthouse; however, we didn’t know that the lighthouse wasn’t accessible at high tide, and… low tide was 5 hours before we arrived.

We still got our first selfie, and it’s a lighthouse selfie, as it should be, even if the lighthouse is a bit far away.

We could have gone for a walk from there, but we decided to start from a bit further away as I’m not entirely confident in my right knee these days (so let’s not fuck it up from the start…); we drove a bit further away to go for a small loop around the nearby golf. It was pretty nice, some sea all around, flat terrain, good stuff. And a hilarious sign at the beginning of the loop, saying essentially “you can relax here, you should hurry here because golf balls fly in this and that direction” 🙂

After that walk, we decided to go to the open air museum on the other side of Reykjavik: it’s a museum where they moved old houses and made a few exhibitions around, mostly, “life in Iceland from the 19th century to now” – there was a lot of neat stuff, and the work on the museum  and the exhibitions was very well done.We also saw one of the (as far as we understand) two locomotives that ever were in Iceland (there are no trains here), which was an unexpected bonus!

We had plans to go see the nearby park/canyon/river, but eventually decided against it as we were quite tired already and the rain started pouring quite heavily.

But, this is where our mid-afternoon plans were starting too! We’re spending a couple of days at our friends’ summer house an hour away from Reykjavik 🙂 We made plans to meet around the local board game shop, Nexus (very nice shop, by the way – good and diverse selection), we went for a bit of grocery shopping (and we got some travel snacks for ourselves), and we arrived in the early evening at said summer house.

We chatted a bit, had dinner, played a couple of board games (Harmonies and Forest Shuffle, both good in different ways!), and it’s now time for bed, for more adventures in the area tomorrow!

The photo album for this day is here: Iceland – 2025-08-15.

Iceland – Day 1

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Last year I wrote my Denmark travel log as I was traveling, and it was a pretty good experience – apart from the fact that writing on a phone is miserable. I’m still writing on a phone, but I added a BlueTooth keyboard to the mix – this should help!

Do not necessarily expect pictures in these posts, as I’m mostly using my DSLR and I’ll process stuff when I come home; but maybe the occasional selfie will still happen here 🙂

Anyway, the first day was mostly a travel day – we left home at 11, spent significant time in the airport because our flight was at 2PM and security was a breeze (the security person made appreciative noises at my camera 😁). We had lunch, we boarded the plane, and we landed in Keflavik after what felt like a long (4 hours) but completely uneventful flight.

Last time we were in Iceland was 9 years ago and we remember the feeling that the airport was under strain, especially in the car renting area; this time around it felt far more streamlined. We had the bad surprise to see that our car had been reserved for 2 days rather than 12; we decided to pay for the difference and handle it with our travel agency (which handled it swiftly) – good thing we could actually do this, it wasn’t a trivial amount of money!

After this small kerfuffle, we took the car from Keflavik to Reykjavik, where we had our first hotel. And, it turns out we have friends in Reykjavik, so we met with them for a small stroll in the city center, followed by an excellent dinner at Monkeys – great food and great company, what more can you ask for!

We ended the day with another stroll around the water, with the hope of digesting a bit (food was great, I had a bit too much of it ˆˆ;). It didn’t completely work – I had a fairly hard time falling asleep after that, and the couple of leg cramps that I attributed to plane and dehydration didn’t help either. But, overall, for a travel day, it worked well, and we did take advantage of our first few hours in Iceland!

52Frames – 2022-35 – Edited by Someone Else

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View over blue/turquoise lakes and green lush mountains with a few clouds and a very blue sky.

This week, 52Frames’ theme was “Edited by someone else” – we had a spreadsheet to sign up, and we could ask other Framers to edit our pictures. I was in Stoos at the beginning of this week, and I was lucky enough to have a few pretty days, during which I captured that image. I sent it to Caleb Levy, who edited the above picture.

I did do more pictures around that area – if you’re interested (with my edits, though, not Caleb’s 😉 ), they’re here: Stoos – August 2022.

52Frames – 2022-09 – Reflections

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The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Reflections” – as usual, it starts by “I’ll just take pictures of a couple of dice on a tablet”, and it ends with a full setup in the softbox with a couple of lights and a tripod.

Still, this does feel like a fairly low-effort / low-motivation / low-creativity shot – but, eh, it’s a shot.

52Frames – 2022-08 – Rule of Thirds

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Drop of water falling into a larger pool of blue water

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Rule of Thirds”. I admit this is not my favorite kind of theme, because it’s not restrictive enough, and it’s not really making my brain thrive with creativity. That said, the extra challenge (which I claimed) was for “1/2000s or faster” – for which flash-less drop photography works reasonably well. I setup three bright LED panels on top of a plate containing water colored in blue, I grabbed a remote and a small drip pipette, and started shooting. I had a few issues at the beginning getting the focus right – but I eventually prevailed by focusing manually on the place where the drop would fall, instead of “the line where I think it would and focusing on the border of the plate” (that didn’t work at all). That, in term, allowed me to open my aperture more, and to finally get enough light without having a super-grainy picture, in order to be actually able to claim the extra challenge.

I’ll have to try that sort of things with flashlights eventually 😉

52Frames – 2022-07 – Unexplored

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Alleys of a cemetery; the individual graves are well spaced and there's a lot of trees.

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Unexplored”. It turns out that there’s a place in Zürich I always kind of wanted to visit but never dared to, because it felt awkward: the local cemetery in Sihlfeld. So I gathered a bit of courage along with my camera, and went there.

Well, it turns out that it’s a beautiful place, very quiet, with a lot of trees; and it… actually didn’t felt too awkward to take pictures there – even less so than in a regular park due to the distinct lack of crowds. I thoroughly enjoyed my stroll there; I was, however, somewhat nonplussed with the pictures I managed to take – which I feel don’t necessarily reflect well the mood of the place. But, now that the initial exploration is out of the way, I’ll probably go back with a better plan in mind 🙂

52Frames – 2022-06 – Depth of Field

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A purple crocus blossom, isolated by shallow depth of field.

The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Depth of Field”, with an extra credit (which I claimed) for “f1.4”. I have exactly one lens able to go up to 1.4, and that’s not its best aperture to say the least 😉 (the chromatic aberration is strong there.) But I was still adamant on claiming this extra credit, because I don’t shoot that wide open enough, and I thought it would make a nice training for me 🙂

I had seen on Instagram cloudsnug mentioning he was seeing the first crocuses in his garden – which made me take my camera on a trip to the Arboretum / Rentenwiese, where I had been delighted by early flowers last year. And indeed, there was snowdrops and purple crocuses, so I spent a bit of time trying to catch a reasonable low depth of field picture of them. It was also a good exercise in manual focus training! I will admit that I would have preferred working with either my 50mm macro (instead of my 50mm non-macro) or with my 100mm macro – but I still very much enjoyed the time I spent at the park.

52Frames – 2021-19 – ISO100

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The theme for 52Frames this week was “ISO100”, with an extra credit for “fully manual”, which I claimed. “ISO100” is typically the kind of theme that doesn’t give me enough constraints to breed creativity; add to it that my motivation this week was pretty low, and this yields a fully uninspired shot, mostly taken to Not Break The Streak.

So here, you get a shot of the clouds over the Uetliberg.

And, consequently, I did not break the streak, and I’ll try to have a better shot next week 😉