Vestrahorn Beach

Vestrahorn Mountain is a six-hour drive East from Reykjavik and is on the Stokknes Peninsula close to the town of Hofn. Unusually for Iceland, the mountain is made out of Iron and Magnesium rich gabbro rock which has weathered to a dark and jagged appearance. The Vestrahorn Beach is composed of finely ground black volcanic sand, light enough to be easily swept along by the strong winter winds. When Dickon and Alice Pownall-Gray visited the beach in December of 2021, the wind gusts were over seventy miles an hour, and temperatures were minus ten Celsius before the wind chill. We struggled to keep our tripods upright and had to shelter our tripods and cameras using our bodies as wind breaks. Taking photographs was hard
because the flying black sand got in our eyes and mouths and on our camera lenses and our hands froze when we tried took of our heavy mittens so as to push our camera's shutter release buttons. We waited in complete darkness for the dawn to begin to strengthen and then took pictures using our Medium Format Fuji GFX 100s cameras with a 23mm wide angle lenses with a HY 0.9 soft graduated neutral density filters. This picture was taken at f/11 with a six second shutter release.