Photographers on the South Coast

The south coast is Route 1 running east from Reykjavík, and it is measured in hours rather than kilometres: Seljalandsfoss is about two, Skógafoss a little over two, Vík two and a half, Skaftafell four and a half, and Jökulsárlón with Diamond Beach roughly five. The road is paved the whole way and open all year in normal weather, but nobody photographs all of it in one session. Choose a half: the waterfalls and Vík in the west, or the glacier, the lagoon and the ice in the east. The western half is the family and couples half. Skógafoss lets you walk across flat gravel to within spray range of sixty metres of water, Seljalandsfoss has the path behind the curtain that soaks everyone who takes it, Vík adds the red church, June lupines and a calmer black beach than its neighbour, and Dyrhólaey looks along the coast from a lighthouse headland with puffins on the cliffs from roughly May to mid-August. Fjaðrárgljúfur, an hour further on, is the moss-walled canyon. In the east, Skaftafell puts a glacier tongue at the end of a flat forty-minute walk, while Jökulsárlón and Diamond Beach carry the elopement and evening work — five hours out, so clients are already sleeping nearby. Landmannalaugar and the Westman Islands sit off the line: F-roads and unbridged fords roughly from late June to September for one, a thirty-five-minute ferry from Landeyjahöfn for the other, when the harbour is open. Two cautions never relax. Reynisfjara and Diamond Beach get sneaker waves — surges that run far past the wet line without warning into a lethally cold sea; nobody turns their back on the water, and nobody stands on wet sand. And the wind here is the strongest in an already windy country, which decides dresses, veils and hairstyles more than any forecast of rain.