Elen and Paul’s Windy, Snowy and Epic Icelandic Engagement Session

A few months ago, my friends, and wedding photographer colleagues James and Abigail  were in a pub discussing photography related things.  We decided that we should stop just talking about the awesome things we wanted to photograph, but instead, actually get out there and photograph them.   A few days later, we sat down and booked tickets to Iceland.  We had grand ideas of the images we wanted to shoot, and we thought we were well on our way to making them happen.

I posted a callout out on my facebook page to see if there was on the off chance someone interested in being photographed in Iceland.  Amazingly enough, Elen and Paul were totally game for coming up from the UK to do their engagement session in Iceland.   We made plans to meet up on the amazing Vik beach, on the south coast of Iceland.  My friends and fellow photographers Abigail and James were with me during the shoot, I knew between the three of us, we would totally rock out this session.

Sadly, we were only about to be on the beach for about 10 minutes before the weather started turning quite sour.  We gave it an honest try, but it quickly became so uncomfortable outside one could hardly think.   We headed for the shelter of our cars, and decided to use the time to change location and and wait to see what the weather would do.  We shortly found ourselves in a very miserable winter storm, with rain and ice coming in sideways off the ocean.   We found it difficult to even get out of cars, let alone shoot.

Looking at the weather radar, it didn’t seem the storm would let up any time soon.  We decided to delay the engagement session and follow each other back across the island towards Reykjavik.    You know the weather is bad while you travel together for safely, just incase one of the cars spins off the road.   The wind was so strong,  we kept passing cars that had been blown off into the ditch.

As we got closer towards the other side of the island, we found out that all of the roads heading north towards Reykjavik had been either closed or listed as “unpassable”.   It wasn’t a big deal to us (the photographers) as we had hired a house on the south side of the island, but Elen and Paul were now completely cut off from their accommodation.  Matter’s quickly turned even worse when the car they had hired started giving them problems as well.  We made the best of it, and offered to have Elen and Paul come and crash with us photographers and wait out the storm.

So while we waited out the storm, I settled on photographing Elen’s engagement ring on a stuffed Puffin that was found in our rental house (as you do).

The next day, once the storm had finally passed, we meet up a park in Reykjavik to finally finish their engagement session.

I love that Elen and Paul have such an adventures spirt.  They not only jumped at the chance to do their engagement photos in Iceland, but they were hugely positive through the whole experience of trying to make their engagement session work with the insane weather.  I feel such an incredible sense of happiness when I look at these images.  Not just because of the amount of work we had to do to get them, but the fact that Elen and Paul were just so awesome about the whole thing.

I am so excited to photograph their wedding this summer…hopefully their won’t be any snow.