In February 2020 I did an amazing photo tour with my friend Bryan of the western and northern part of Iceland. One of the first places we shot up north was this beautiful turf house church called Víðimýrarkirkja. We were there at dawn but it was a rainy overcast day, the snow on the ground wet and slushy, and in front of the church was a big sheet of ice where the snow had been compact. These are in no way super extreme conditions compared to some of the conditions I’ve shot in, and a few days later we had what’s undoubtedly one of the most extreme conditions I’ve encountered. You can read about that on my blog. Anyway, everything being wet provides me with a challenge when shooting peel-apart Polaroids. We had pretty much wrapped up our session. We both had some shots we were happy with but I decided to find one final angle to shoot at. That’s this angle, which proved to be the best one, but this photo is obviously not taken on a rainy overcast day. See, Bryan was smart and was shooting with a wide angle lens, but I was shooting with a standard lens (100mm is standard for this format) and when it’s rainy and cold and all your equipment is wet you start to get a bit sloppy and just changing a lens becomes a big deal. A wide angle lens was quite essential because the camera is resting on a knee-high wall, so you can’t move any farther back or the wall would be in your way at that angle. So to make a long story longer, a few days later we were looking over Bryan’s shots and I absolutely loved his shot from this angle, taking in the whole tree and the cross. Mine cropped out the top of the tree and the bottom of the cross. Boy was I pissed off at myself. Luckily we had to go the same way back a few days later but I wasn’t sure if we’d have time to re-shoot this location. But we did, and we did, obviously. So yeh, great story, I know. I think they’ll make a movie about it one day. Straight to DVD, with commentaries by me. Yep.