Tacos and Beer

Stacey and I visited Iceland a few years ago and absolutely loved it. It’s a stunningly beautiful country (assuming you like mountains, waterfalls, and beaches). And it’s a relatively easy trip — it’s only six hours or so by plane from the States. The one thing we really wanted to see that we missed last time we visited was the northern lights. So when we visited Iceland a second time (this time bringing our friend Kelly along), that was our big bucket list item. We were not expecting to see a volcano. So seeing that like an hour after we landed was pretty amazing . The thing about the northern lights (and most other astronomical phenomena), is they’re hard to see from the city. Cities usually produce some amount of light pollution , and that makes it tough to see anything but the brightest objects in the night sky. To improve our chances of seeing the lights, we booked a tour with some local Icelandic guys who take you out of town in a van to good (i.e. very dark) viewing l...

As much as I love real film and real film cameras (I shot my first two features with an Aaton LTR 16mm film camera), I rarely shoot film anymore. Because (1) digital is pretty good these days, and (2) film (and film processing) is really expensive. Stacey is more of a stills shooter than me. She’d been kind of thinking about maybe getting a new stills camera. Which got me reading up on stills cameras. I asked Chris Mitchell what he liked these days, and he started singing the praises of Fuji’s digital cameras. I started looking at Fuji’s options and talked Stacey into getting a Fujifilm X-T30 II . Aside from taking good photos, it’s just a good-looking camera — it is silver and black and has a charming retro-but-not-too-retro look. We’ve been in Iceland for the past few days, and I must admit that I have been using Stacey’s new camera a lot more than she has. And I really, really like it. I assume you can just shoot regular “raw” photos with this camera and then tweak the c...

Stacey and I (and our friend Kelly ) came to Iceland for a few days for a quick vacation. We’re hoping to see the northern lights, which are apparently relatively active this time of year. We haven’t quite seen any aurora yet (I’ll tell that story in another post), but we did see a big dang volcanic eruption. We figured out after the fact that the volcano erupted not long after we landed at the Reykjavik airport. The eruption was visible from our rental car for several miles of our trip out of town. I managed to get a couple of photos of the eruption with my phone, but they don’t do it justice. The volcano is a lot more epic in person. The Guardian has more details about the Iceland volcano . Plus better photos and some video.