I’ve traveled a lot over the years. Most of it for work — showing up in a new city, shooting a conference or a concert or a brand event, and heading home. I’m not complaining. I love what I do and I’ve seen a lot of the world because of it. But this past February I did something a little different. I went somewhere purely for myself.
No client. No shot list. No deliverables. Just Iceland, a rental car, and a week to figure it out.
The reason was simple: I wanted to see the Northern Lights. That was it. That was the whole trip. Everything else — the itinerary, the route, the stops — was built around giving myself the best possible chance of standing under an aurora before I flew home.
Planning the Trip
I used ChatGPT to map out a week-long driving itinerary, which turned out to be one of the better decisions I made. I told it what I wanted to see, how many days I had, and that I’d be doing it all by car. It gave me a solid framework that I then adjusted as I went. The final route covered about 1,100 miles — one night in Reykjavík when I arrived, three nights in a south coast cabin in Hvolsvöllur, then back to finish the last two nights at the same hotel in Reykjavík I’d started at.
Traveling solo meant the whole thing moved at my pace. No compromises, no waiting around. Just me and whatever was out the windshield.
The Drive
The drive turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the whole trip — which I didn’t expect going in. Iceland is the kind of place where you can’t really have a bad day behind the wheel. The landscape just keeps changing. I pulled over constantly. Not because I had to, but because the light and the land kept demanding it.
The day I drove out to Jökulsárlón — the glacier lagoon — I got caught in a full snowstorm. Studded tires, all wheel drive — I came prepared, and it ended up being one of the more adventurous days of the trip. There’s something about driving through a whiteout in Iceland that makes you feel very small and very alive at the same time. Katla was a different kind of adventure altogether — you can’t drive yourself out there. They take you in heavy expedition vehicles across the terrain to reach the cave. Worth every minute of it.
From Hvolsvöllur I worked my way along the south coast — Skógafoss, Reynisfjara, Vík. Then pushed east to Jökulsárlón before looping back west through Snæfellsjökull National Park and up to Kirkjufell, which had been on my list for a while. Every single day had something.
On the stereo: Pat Metheny, Chappell Roan, Billy Joel, Steely Dan, Lady Gaga, Jessie J.
The Cameras
I brought two cameras and used them very differently, which turned out to be exactly the right call.
The Nikon Z9 was my primary workhorse — landscapes, waterfalls, the glacier cave, the auroras. It handled everything I threw at it and then some. Shooting in those conditions — cold, wet, unpredictable light — the Z9 never gave me a moment’s hesitation.
The Fuji X100F was for everything else. Street scenes in Reykjavík, quieter moments, the kind of casual shooting you do when you’re not really working. I shot it exclusively in black and white using a custom recipe, then brought the files into Lightroom to push them further. There’s something about the Fuji’s rendering in black and white that just works — it has a quality that feels more like film than digital, and Iceland’s landscapes lend themselves to that treatment. The stark contrast between snow, black lava rock, and grey sky looks incredible when you strip the color out.
Having two cameras with completely different purposes meant I was never forcing either one to do something it wasn’t built for. No pressure, no agenda. It reminded me of something I sometimes lose track of when I’m shooting commercially — the instinct to just find the frame is always there. It doesn’t need a brief to show up.
Somewhere in all of it I reconnected with why I picked up a camera in the first place. It was always the sky and the landscape — natural beauty that makes you want to hold onto it somehow. Iceland gave me a lot to hold onto.
The Northern Lights
For six nights the sky gave me nothing. Clear nights, cloudy nights, it didn’t matter. Nothing.
I kept checking the aurora forecast apps. I kept the faith. I told myself I hadn’t come all this way to go home empty handed.
On the second to last night I drove out to Grótta lighthouse in Seltjarnarnes — a spot just west of Reykjavík that’s well known among aurora hunters for its dark skies and unobstructed horizon. And there they were.
I want to say something about the naked eye experience because I think it gets undersold. I’d spent years looking at aurora photographs and wondered how much of what I was seeing was the camera — long exposures punching up color and detail that the human eye can’t actually perceive. The answer, at least that night, was that they were completely visible and genuinely stunning without a camera in hand. I stood there for a few minutes just watching before I even thought about shooting. That’s not something that happens to me very often.
When I did get to work, I had the Z9 on a tripod with my 20mm f/1.8. That lens was the right call for this — fast enough to keep my ISO well below what most people assume you need for aurora work. I was shooting under ISO 640 for most of it, and some frames came in under 100. The 1.8 aperture was doing the heavy lifting. I experimented with shutter speeds from around 10 seconds out to 60 seconds depending on how much movement was in the sky and how much of the foreground I wanted to render. The longer exposures smoothed everything out and brought in more of the ambient light from the lighthouse and the surrounding area. The shorter ones froze more detail in the aurora itself.
Conditions were challenging in ways I hadn’t fully anticipated. It was very dark, icy underfoot, and there were other people moving around the area. I walked in front of my own camera once — which I’ll leave at that — and spent the rest of the night being more deliberate about my framing and positioning before hitting the shutter. Sometimes the field conditions teach you things the studio never will.
Coming Home
Trips like this have a way of teaching you something small but useful about yourself. I think mine was just that I needed to do more of this.
I’m turning 50 in a couple of weeks. I’ve framed this year around showing up for experiences the way I show up for everyone else’s. Iceland was the first one. It won’t be the last.
📍 Iceland, February 2026
