Photographers in the Westfjords

The Westfjords are the part of Iceland most visitors never reach, and the distance is the whole point. Ísafjörður is roughly five to six hours' drive from Reykjavík, or a short domestic flight, which is the sane option for a weekend. Many of the roads out here are gravel, mountain passes close in winter storms, and there are long stretches with no fuel — so a session in this region is planned around an arrival day, not fitted in between two others. Ísafjörður sits on a curling sandspit inside Skutulsfjörður, with mountain walls rising some seven hundred metres on three sides and, on calm days, a mirror on the water that the south coast never gets. The tarred eighteenth-century timber houses at Neðstikaupstaður give period backdrops a few steps from the harbour. Látrabjarg is the far end: fourteen kilometres of bird cliff at the westernmost point of Europe, with puffins on the grassy lip from roughly late April to early August, the red-gold sand of Rauðasandur around the headland and the beached hull of the Garðar BA 64 in between. The last stretches of Roads 612 and 614 are narrow gravel and effectively summer roads, roughly June to September, with no fuel past Patreksfjörður — and the cliff edge is undercut turf with nothing underneath it, so everyone stays well back. The region self-selects. Elopements, anniversaries and adventure sessions with clients who planned the drive do well here; spontaneous bookings do not. In June the midnight sun rolls along the mouth of the fjord; from late November to late January the sun never clears the mountains at all, and the long blue twilight becomes the aesthetic. Weather is the schedule, so keep the date flexible and allow a whole day per location. One region per session is not a preference in the Westfjords — it is the geography.