LAND OF ICE AND FIRE

The moss has taken generations to gather over the lava. We photograph it in one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of a second. Between these two measures of time, an entire understanding of the world is at stake. What can an instant tell us about such patient growth? The shutter closes, and on the small illuminated screen the image appears complete. Before us, everything continues: moisture enters the moss, water travels beneath the ice, the ground holds a heat older than any human memory. We look again. Perhaps the photograph begins here, in the uneasiness of knowing how little its apparent certainty contains.

In Iceland, exposure becomes a way of thinking about our own brief presence. A fast shutter gives each airborne drop a separate body; a longer exposure allows the falling water to become a continuous trace. The waterfall contains both possibilities, and innumerable others. We choose one. That choice carries our understanding of movement, our feeling for duration, our desire to preserve something that will never hold still for us.

The aperture opens another question. How much of the world belongs together? A fold of moss, a fractured stone, the distant slope: we can bring them into relation or let one emerge while the others dissolve. Through focus and distance, we give form to an idea of belonging. Every image includes a decision about what deserves our attention and what we are willing to leave unresolved.

Photographic language

You will learn to construct a landscape photograph as an argument rather than a view. We will examine horizon, scale, distance, sequence, repetition and the relation between a single image and a complete body of work. You will work with the difference between describing a place and allowing a place to question you. The journey will develop your ability to edit in the field, recognise recurring visual ideas and build a personal series without forcing every location into the same style.

Technique

You will learn to expose and focus in long, unstable northern light; to work with rain, spray, steam, backlight, reflective water, black sand, pale ice and low-contrast weather; and to decide when a tripod, filtration, bracketing or a longer focal length genuinely serves the image. We will study shutter speed as a way of describing water and wind, depth of field as a narrative choice, focus discipline in difficult visibility, lens protection, battery management, redundant storage and a practical field-to-edit workflow. Technique will always be connected to intention: not how to perform an effect, but why a particular material, distance or duration requires it.

The culture of place

The educational programme extends beyond photographic technique. We will read the island through volcanology, glaciology, weather, settlement, language, food, fishing history, folklore and the social culture of public swimming pools. Local experts, guides, museums, farms and small communities will help us understand that a landscape is never empty and that even apparently untouched ground possesses names, uses, memories and responsibilities. This cultural knowledge is not an appendix to the photography. It changes what we are capable of seeing.

Field practice and authorship

You will learn to prepare a day without imprisoning it inside a shot list, to respond to closures and weather without losing the conceptual direction of the work, and to photograph rare places without converting rarity into conquest. Daily conversations and editing sessions will connect individual images to an evolving project. By the end of the journey, each participant will have the foundations of a coherent Icelandic portfolio and a clearer understanding of their own visual language.

We have travelled through Iceland so many times that I can no longer remember how many journeys there have been — or how many carefully planned itineraries the island has quietly undone.

We have slept in hotels and remote lodges, in improvised shelters offered by old friends, and in tents pitched in the middle of storms or at the edge of a landscape still being born.

We have been forced to move camp three or four times in a single night, following the wind, the weather, and the restless will of the earth. But Iceland is wild; it is pure force. Here, the violence of nature is not violence, but necessity — an ancient and absolute command. And slowly, almost without noticing, every group begins to change with it.

Expectations shift: promises of comfortable hotels give way to impossible camps, temporary shelter, solitary lodges lost in the emptiness, and places without comfort but just beside a secret thermal springs where no one ever comes.

Hotels, lodges, camps in the wilderness, tents in the middle of nowhere: after all these years, I have learned not to decide everything in advance. Perhaps the only honest choice is to gather the group, listen to what Iceland has already changed within us, and decide together where we wish to sleep.

Essential requirements

• Primary camera body and, if possible, a second body
• Wide-angle lens, approximately 14–24mm or equivalent
• Standard zoom, approximately 24–70mm or equivalent
• Telephoto lens, approximately 70–200mm or 100–400mm
• Stable field tripod
• Remote release or reliable camera timer
• Circular polariser compatible with your principal landscape lens
• Neutral-density filters, ideally 3, 6 and 10 stops
• At least three charged batteries per camera body
• Two independent sets of memory cards
• Laptop or tablet for editing and two separate SSD backups
• Waterproof camera cover, dry bags, lens cloths and cleaning brush
• Waterproof boots already tested before the journey
• Warm layers, windproof and waterproof shell, waterproof trousers
• Thin photography gloves that work on a touchscreen, such as DIRTY RIGGER, a warm hat and eye protection
• Refillable water bottle, thermos and compact lunch container
• Headlamp with red-light mode for early starts and dark interiors

Fifteen days around an island that changes weather at every bend of the ring road. Pack once, well, and for everything.

Fifteen days around Iceland means fifteen different weathers, sometimes in a single afternoon. The ring road shows you everything, and asks you to be ready for everything. Layers, waterproofs, good boots, a thermos: the simplest things are the ones that let you stay out when the light finally opens.

What you bring

What we buy together

What we bring for you

All the rest travels in the van, in waterproof dry bags: a local SIM card, and a loan phone if needed; a Starlink satellite connection, for the fjords and the highlands where the signal fades; a walkie-talkie; a first-aid kit; a compass, a map case and printed maps; a tablet for every two people; a little local currency; a laminated emergency sheet; document pouches; and your own printed copy of our unique guide.

In August, Iceland does not divide the day neatly into light and darkness.

The hours extend into one another. Morning arrives slowly, evening refuses to end, and the landscape remains available to the eye long after a conventional day of photography would have closed. Light can appear low and lucid at midnight, or disappear entirely behind rain, sea mist and a moving wall of cloud in the middle of the afternoon.

This is not the hard light of a country waiting for sunset.

It is a long, shifting field of possibility.

Across lava plains, black beaches, highland ash, glacial water and northern coasts, the same weather may create a different photograph every few kilometres. A break in cloud can turn a grey valley into a theatre of silver; rain can soften distance until mountain, sky and water become one surface; wind can bring sudden clarity, then take it away again.

We will work with this changing light rather than waiting for an ideal one.

Some days will begin before the world seems fully awake. Others will continue into the pale hours after dinner, when the roads are quieter, the air is colder, and the landscape begins to reveal its deeper tonal structure. There will be no obligation to chase every hour of light; there will be time to rest, to return, to edit, and to understand what the day has given.

The programme is built around attention, not prediction.

In Iceland, the most memorable light is often not the light one imagined before leaving home. It is the light that arrives unexpectedly: on wet stone, in a brief clearing, across an empty road, or in the silence after the weather has passed.

The journey takes place between 2 and 16 August, when Iceland is leaving the season of near-continuous summer light and slowly recovering the night.

At the beginning of the programme, the sky will remain bright far into the night. Darkness is still brief and often softened by a long blue twilight, especially in the North. By the final days, the nights become visibly deeper: sunset arrives earlier, the interval between evening and morning light widens, and a short period of genuine darkness may become possible when cloud cover allows it.

This is not yet the Icelandic winter night.

It is a threshold: a sky moving, day by day, from prolonged luminosity towards darkness.

On 2 August in Reykjavík, sunrise falls at approximately 04:36 and sunset at 22:28. In the North, around Siglufjörður and Mývatn (4–8 August), the sun rises near 04:10–04:25 and sets near 22:30–22:00. By the eastern fjords and Höfn (11–13 August), sunrise has moved to around 04:30–04:45 and sunset to around 21:30; at Vík on 15 August, the sun rises near 05:10 and sets near 21:27. In two weeks, the day loses well over an hour.

The moon follows the same gradual transformation. The journey begins on the new moon, with the darkest available sky conditions of the period. The moon then grows through its first quarter and approaches fullness as the programme ends; the full moon falls on 17 August, immediately after the photographic journey. During the first part of the route, a clear sky may therefore reveal the first stars, the brighter constellations and, where the darkness is sufficient, a faint sense of the Milky Way. Later, moonlight may reduce the visibility of faint stars while giving the landscape a softer nocturnal presence: water, glaciers, black sand and cloud can remain legible after sunset.

August is Iceland’s mildest month, but not a warm one. On the coasts, temperatures commonly range from about 8 to 14 °C, and feel colder with wind and rain. In the highlands around Askja and Holuhraun, nights can approach freezing, and snow at altitude is not impossible. These are seasonal ranges, not a forecast.

Aurora Borealis is not included in the programme and cannot be promised. It requires sufficient darkness, clear or partly clear skies and auroral activity; during this August window, the night is only beginning to return. If it appears, it will be an unplanned encounter, never an expectation.

On the morning of 2 August 2027, the first day of the programme, a partial solar eclipse is visible from Reykjavík and other parts of Iceland. It is a modest event from Reykjavík rather than totality, but it may offer an extraordinary opening gesture if sky and schedule allow. It must only ever be observed or photographed with proper certified solar filters; the Sun must never be viewed directly through a camera, lens, binoculars or the naked eye.

Iceland is not a difficult country because it is hostile.

It is difficult because it remains entirely itself.

Here, weather is not a detail around the journey: it is one of its central forces. Wind can change the balance of a walk, rain can make lava, gravel and volcanic ground slippery, mist can close a horizon in minutes, and a road that seemed open in the morning may no longer be the right road to take in the afternoon.

For this reason, LAND OF ICE AND FIRE asks for a reasonable level of physical confidence, patience and adaptability. On some days we will walk over uneven ground, remain outdoors in rain and strong wind, enter and leave high-clearance vehicles, and carry our own essential camera equipment. Walks may reach approximately five kilometres; the Askja day, if conditions allow it to take place, may be long.

But this is not an expedition designed to test endurance.

It is a photographic journey designed to place you attentively in front of a living landscape.

Whenever possible, Luca will shape the rhythm around the group: choosing vehicle-near viewpoints, offering shorter alternatives, allowing time to warm up, rest, look again, and work with care rather than urgency. Yet certain places cannot be made step-free, entirely sheltered, or physically effortless. The highlands, volcanic ground, exposed coasts and changing weather retain their own terms.

Before confirming a place, we ask each participant to speak openly with us about mobility, balance, vertigo, respiratory sensitivity, dietary requirements, or any condition affected by cold, sulphurous gas or long transfers. This is not a question of exclusion. It is the beginning of a responsible conversation: how can each person take part fully, safely and with dignity?

No photograph is ever more important than the safety of the group.

The route will always follow the conditions of the day. A workshop leader, local guide, ranger, road authority or weather service may decide to shorten a walk, change a location or cancel an activity. In Iceland, this is not a failure of the journey. It is part of learning how to be present in a land that cannot be commanded.

This journey follows a country in motion.

In Iceland, a route is never simply a line between two points. It is an agreement, renewed each day, between the road, the weather, the light, the land and the people travelling through it.

Some of the landscapes at the heart of LAND OF ICE AND FIRE lie beyond the ordinary rhythm of the ring road: volcanic interiors, highland tracks, river country, glacial margins and exposed valleys. Their access depends on conditions that cannot be decided months in advance. Roads may open late, close without warning, or require a local operator and the right vehicle. Wind, rain, river levels, volcanic activity, visibility and official advice can all alter the shape of a day.

We do not treat this uncertainty as an inconvenience around the real journey. It is part of the real journey.

Askja, Þeistareykir, Gjástykki and Þórsmörk will be approached only when the roads are officially open, the conditions are sound, and the appropriate local operators judge the passage responsible. No route will be forced; no river will be crossed for a photograph; no image will be pursued against the decision of a guide, ranger, road authority or weather service.

When a place cannot be reached, we will not replace it with a hurried substitute. We will turn towards another landscape that belongs to the same larger story: another field of lava, another coast, another valley, another form of weather and light. Iceland does not offer one definitive image of itself. Its strength lies precisely in its capacity to change the image we thought we had come to make.

The programme is therefore designed with structure, but not rigidity. Each day has an intention, a territory and a photographic direction; each day also remains open to the conditions that make the work truthful. We may leave earlier, stay longer, reverse a sequence, return to a place, or abandon a planned route entirely when the land asks us to do so.

The fifteen days of photographic work are held between 2 and 16 August.

Around them, London Photographic Workshop offers the group two additional days in Reykjavík: the day before the journey begins and the day after it ends. These are not teaching days, nor are they hidden additions to the programme. They are offered as time: time to arrive without haste, to meet the group, to prepare the equipment and the eye; then, at the end, time to return slowly from the road, to rest, to make a first selection of images, or simply to let the journey settle before flying home.

The experience therefore opens on 1 August and closes on 17 August, while the fifteen central days remain wholly dedicated to the photographic journey across Iceland.

This is not uncertainty without care.

It is a way of travelling that gives priority to attention, safety and the possibility of making photographs that could only have been made on that particular day, in that particular weather, with that particular light.

After leaving Iceland, where water, lava, weather and ice had each altered the measure of time, the images need the company of those who learned to wait within that changing ground together.

I did not include six months of post-workshop contact by chance, nor as a simple service.

Many years ago, I was teaching an online course that could easily have felt impersonal. Instead, when it ended, the group did not want to dissolve. We had never all sat around the same table, yet years later we are still a living community. From that experience came conversations, magazines, books, friendships and shared ways of looking.

It taught me how valuable a small circle of people can be when they have lived and worked through an experience together.

For this reason, every journey includes six months of continued contact at no additional cost, and those months are where the photographs are carried to their end, together. A private group keeps the images moving between us: feedback, and a tuition that goes on, fed by cultural prompts — a book, an image, a thought, an exhibition, an occasion that opens a new direction. Each of you brings your images to a master file ready for fine print, and then we sit down, one to one, before the finished work. Then the group meets again, and there is a particular pleasure in it: seeing how far each of us has travelled since we parted. A Second Eye, an editor or a curator, reads the work as the profession reads it. And the work takes form, a collective book or a zine, depending on the event, and a public life, on a gallery wall or in the pages of Follow the Light. The images do not go back into a drawer. They go out into the world, and they go out together.

The event ends. The adventure in photography begins.