Such is the attraction of Iceland as a destination, that you could be forgiven for thinking that there isn’t any professional landscape photographer worth their neutral density filters who hasn’t lugged a tripod and ball head to its seismic shores. Yet, until a year ago, Northern Ireland’s John Miskelly had been deliberately avoiding making the flight to Reykjavík. “I had always avoided Iceland because I thought it had been shot to death,” he says.
However, recent volcanic eruptions and the chance to use a drone for aerial views of the landscape enticed his change of sentiment. “I went for an 11-day trip and rented a Jeep with a roof tent and stopped at the campsites scattered around the country,” he enthuses. “The drone gave me the opportunity to do a wider variety of stuff up there.”
John now regards that first visit as a recce for another carefully planned return trip he hopes to make next January or February: “I would like to do it in winter with a lot more snow. I like simplistic compositions. A lot of my images are very simple and broken down into their very basic elements.”
One place that John returns to often is Venice, and with another trip planned six weeks after we speak, you can hear the excitement building in his voice: “I would shoot Venice most years, I just love the city.”
Winter and early spring are also his preferred times for shooting landscapes because, as he explains:
