Iceland is El Dorado for Photographers and Adventures

Words and pictures by Sascha Hojzakowa and Markus Brungs

We are 2 german artists and photographers. We started our art project in 2012 and focused on the beginning of our scientific high-speed photography project „Aqua Momentum“ (photographing Waterdrops at 1/10000sec), which received much attention locally and globally. Then we traveled to more than 10 European countries to take photographs for our starting portfolio.

Iceland, the land of fire and ice, was a highlight of our photo tours. A true El Dorado for landscape photographers and adventurers.

Forget about crowds, busy streets, and overfilled parking places. Even at major tourist attractions such as the Strokkur geyser or the Gulfoss waterfall, there is always enough time and space to admire the scenery and take pictures.

There are no buildings or trees to block the view over the endlessly wide lava fields, glaciers, or meadows. You will feel as free as an Icelandic horse on the prairie, or the birds on the seaside cliffs.

However, you can’t let hurricane-like gusts, sudden cloudbursts, or summer temperatures below 10° bother you. After a few minutes, you will usually be rewarded by a beautiful rainbow.

We took the long road (Route 1/Ringroad) around Iceland and drove more than 2500km, stopping at the famous landmarks and some hidden natural features of Iceland. Our trip took 3 weeks. We stayed in local accommodations for a week, then traveled to the next location.

Most of our Iceland photography uses special techniques like new wide-angle lenses, long exposures with camera filters, and specialized post-processing, without corrupting the original image. We call it artistic photography made with our own fingerprint.

We love nature and its features! If you are enthralled by the beauty of a landscape or filled with awe by the power of nature, then you’ll realize what motivates us in photography and what spurs us on to discover new places and motifs, to travel further and wait patiently for the perfect light.

Our eyes can perceive some events in our daily lives only as motion, but the aspect of a single vignette of movement remains hidden to us in its perfection. The camera renders this fraction of a second visible to us. Hence, we came up with the idea of capturing the sculptures of falling water drops. Water is the stuff without which life as we know it would not exist.

And we gaze upon the stars in the firmament, we realize that we are truly much smaller than a grain of sand on the beach. Earth, our planet, is just one of many, and our sun is only one star among billions and billions of stars. The stars above move because the Earth rotates, and long-exposure photography of the starry sky renders this phenomenon visible. The backdrop, our earth in all of its splendor, makes the perfect stage.

Our composition of landscape photographs (motif, angle, etc.) is oriented towards paintings (fine arts), which stems from our background in painting.