Preparations for my Iceland Trip — CESAR MENDEZ

Going to Iceland its been on my bucket list for at least four years now, even knowing that every year that passes it gets more crowds that the previous year I wasn’t really able to get myself there any sooner. The reasons were simple, I was living in China as an expat, and getting to Iceland was basically one of the farthest places to travel from Shanghai, and I had plenty of places to shoot in Southeast Asia, so there was no reason for me to make that long travel across the globe.

Now that I’m back to my home country, Mexico, Iceland moved to the top of the travel destinations list since I left Asia, I can take a flight from Mexico to New York, and then New York to Reykjiavik, it will be a total of 17 hours to get there, 10 hours of actual air time, not bad at all.

Before I made any purchase, the first thing I did was telling my wife that we needed a well deserved vacation, and ask her is she was willing to come with me to the trip, but unfortunately for a number of reasons she couldn’t make it, but as an awesome wife that she is, she said “you can go, have a week all to yourself”, isn’t that awesome?

Once I’ve got my wife’s approval for the trip, the first thing that I did was researching for the cheapest flights available for the next 3 to 4 weeks, I planned the trip to leave as soon as possible because I was on mid-April, Iceland’s tip end of the winter, so, those are the dates where low season ends, and the high season kicks off, so being there by May was my best choice to avoid peak season that I believe to be from June to August. Another great thing about May is that the days are starting to get longer (awesome for photography, horrible for sleeping), 22 hours of light, in which the good light for photography started from around 20:00 all the way up to 05:00 depending on which part of the Iceland you happen to be, I learned this on the go of course, I almost missed a great sunrise because I thought the sun was going to raise at 03:00 like on my last location, but only 200 km from one location to the other made a huge difference on the time for the sunrise, on these eastern location the sun raises at 02:00, for my fortune I wasn’t asleep as I was backing up all the photos from the prior day, and because I rented a campervan for the trip, I was very close to the photo location.

Once I had my tickets I started to familiarized with the map of Iceland and pin all the places that I would like to photograph even though I knew it was going to be impossible to cover all in this one trip, but, planning is the key of success, in all the years that I have been planning my photo trips, planning is the most important part of the process to have a higher probability to come back with amazing photos, then, you can’t plan the weather, but, you can work around if you are prepared, but take my advice, don’t worry about the weather in Iceland, the conditions change so rapidly that I think in my opinion is almost impossible to have a work around. I strongly believe that strong weather conditions can play on your favor getting very dramatic images, it can me difficult but worth it.

Now that I planned what I wanted to photograph, it was time to plan the accommodation, and here is where it started to get tricky, I made like four different itineraries before I realized that what I wanted to achieve was almost impossible doing it this way. The thing is, that the guest houses being what they are, they have a very limited schedule, the check in was on average at 4 pm in the afternoon and check out was about 10 am in the morning; me, as a photographer I knew that I would be shooting everyday between 8 pm and 5 am, so I wouldn’t be able to get so much sleep after the sunrise shoot, and this because the accommodations usually were not close to the shooting locations (with some exceptions), so there was still some driving involved afterwards. So, to solve this issue I decided to rent a camper-van instead, it wasn’t cheap, but I was only paying like 250 USD more compared to renting a normal car plus the Guesthouses, obviously there are some pros and cons, but I will get that detail in further blogs.

The best thing about a camper-van is that your bed has always the best views!!

Before talk about gear, I want to address another important subject, clothing. Make sure always to check what are the average weather conditions the month that you plan to visit Iceland, in my particular case I went in May, which is consider the last winter month, so I brought with me something that would keep me worm in a 5 degrees Celsius environment, which is not that bad, but when winds pick up you can have a temperature sensation of -10 degrees Celsius, so, for this conditions a good worm jacket that is water and wind resistant is your best choice, on my last trip to Japan I bought a Super Dry jacket that met all my needs on my Iceland trip, Im super happy with it. For the bottoms I just took my regular hiking pants, which were not bad, but I think I could have done better. And the most important of all is to keep your feet dry, so I bought some nice warm boots with water insulation, I picked them up at the Decathlon store, which has a lot camping and hiking gear and it is very affordable. Keeping your feet dry is the most important thing for safety hikes, for health reasons and for comfort, so this are a must.

Making a summary, we now have the airplane tickets, car with resting bed, clothing and a roughly itinerary.

Now, lets talk about the gear that I decided to take on this trip. The first thing to consider is your subject, so in this case is Iceland, a landscape photography paradise, so we are going to be shooting mostly natural light, waterfalls, mountains and seascapes in the most part. Then you have to think about how are you going to carry all the gear, do you have to bring all your gear all the time with you? Or, can you just take out what you need and store the rest of it? So, in this case, because I rented a Campervan I had a mobile home with me all the times, so I decided to bring almost full equipment with me because I was going to be able to leave some weight behind in the car if I decided that I wouldn’t be needed something for that intended photograph; also is important to highlight that I was comfortable to leave some gear in the car because Iceland is a very safe place, and even like that you could get robbed, but if I have to take risks about it, I feel fine doing it in Iceland.

So, here is the list of the gear that I decided to take on this trip:

- Main camera body D850

- Back up camera body D810

- Tamron 15-30 mm f2.8

- Tamron 24-70 mm f2.8

- Tamron 70-200 mm f2.8

- Haida 150 mm filter holder

- Haida ring adapter for 15-30 Tamron lens

- Haida ring adapter 82 mm for the 24-70 Tamron lens

- Haida ring adapter 77 mm for the 70-200 Tamron lens

- Haida 150 mm ND filter 0,9 (3 stop)

- Haida 150 mm ND filter ND1000 ND 3.0 (10 stop)

- Main Tripod Manfrotto MT055CXPRO5 055 Carbon Fiber

- Manfrotto XPro Ball Head with Quick release

- 3 Legged Thing L bracket

- Secondary Tripod, old aluminum tripod (I don’t recall the specifications)

- Small Manfrotto pocket tripod

- 4 EN-EL 15a batteries for my Nikons

- 2 Battery chargers

- Cleaning cloths

- Cable realease

- Peak Design camera straps

- DJI Mavic Pro (never made it out of the bag)

- Memory cards (lots of them)

- Sony XQD/SD card reader

- 2 TB Seagate Solid State Hard Drive

- 2013 Macbook Pro

- 30 Lt Everyday Backpack from Peak Design

Just writing down all this gear it gets me overwhelmed. Believe it or not, I managed to put all of these inside the 30 Lt Everyday Backpack from Peak Design, just the tripods, cables and chargers I put them on my documented luggage.

If I had to take out something from the bag to reduce the weight it would have been the DJI Mavic Pro. I didn’t fly it even once, mainly for two reasons, the first one was the weather, everyday I was getting showers, hale, gusts of winds from 60 up to a 100 km/hour, I just had a couple of moments where I could have tried to fly it, but either I was concentrated on something else or I was too tired to even try. And the second and most important reason was that the Icelandic authorities were prohibiting to fly the drones in every main location, so basically you could just fly it out on a deserted road (Iceland is amazing enough that wherever you fly is impressive), so because of these reasons I didn’t even bother to take it out, it’s sad though.

The trip is set up now!

By the way, it is very important to double check all the documents for the trip, starting for the passport and if you are renting a vehicle, also your driver’s license.

For the passport you can think like is common sense, and even if almost all the countries have very similar rules, there are some that don’t, so always be sure to check what’s the minimum expiration date, the normal rule is six months, but there are countries that want you to have at least one year. Also, you need to check if your nationality requires a special visa for tourism, I learn this the hard way on my way to Thailand, but that’s a story for another blog; and also, some countries require a minimum of blank pages left on your passport. So be sure about these things because if you are denied entry into a country not only it will ruin your trip, but also you will lose a lot of money, and in the worst-case scenario you could end up in jail for arriving into a country without proper documentation.

For the driver’s license, I think every country has its own set of particular rules to allowed foreigners to drive, so, up to the date May 2018, for Iceland in particular, you just required a valid driver’s license with at least one year from the issue date and at least one year from the expiration date, also, if your native language is not English, your driver’s license has to be in double language, for example in my case, Spanish/English. Anyway, I recommend you to always double check this information and if possible, send to the company that you would like to hire the car a photo of your driver’s license for a pre-approval, they could tell you in advance if it is good or not.

Now that you have your documents ready I strongly recommend, but up to you, that you buy a travel insurance, you never know when you could use one. I have heard horror stories about people having big trouble because they urgently needed medical attention in a foreign country during their vacations and the cost of that is not where near the cost of a travel insurance. Me personally I never thought of insuring myself during a trip until I had my first born child, then I started buying it every time I go out to a trip, thankfully I never needed it, but is a good piece of mind just knowing that you are covered in case something goes wrong.