They called me paranoid. They said I was wasting money. They told me it couldn’t possibly rain that much! They were wrong. (I’m not sure who “they” are, precisely, but let’s say “they’re” parents/friends/psychiatrist). For the past several days, I’ve been traveling through Iceland in the kind of weather you see newsmen standing in during a hurricane. Should that man really be standing so close to the sea, should he be within a hundred feet of live electrical wires, and what’s the point of holding that inside-out umbrella, anyway? Well, if the newsman wants to captivate his audience, then the answer to each of these questions has to be: YES (except for the last one, which isn’t really a “yes” or “no” kind of question).
I spent around $850 on a Nikon AW1, a water and shock-proof camera with an interchangeable lens and better image quality than any other waterproof camera within a few thousand dollars. And good thing I did, because boy has it been raining. I’ve climbed up mountains, descended into ravines, and approached more waterfalls than I can count—all with my waterproof shoes, pants, jacket, backpack, and camera.
Whenever I get a spot of sun or a break in the rain, I pull out my two Canon cameras, run around like a maniac, and capture as much as I possibly can using each of my lenses. I can’t even imagine what I must look like to other tourists, but I don’t care. I came here for the purpose of taking great photos, and great photos are what I’m going to take. When the rain returns, away go the Canons, on goes the waterproof backpack cover, and out comes my Nikon AW1.
All of this photo craziness came to a head yesterday when, while hiking out to see Dettifos—the most powerful waterfall in Europe—I slipped and fell. The rain and wind combined forces to push and pull me in every direction, and the rocks over which I climbed were slick with layers of algae that had built up over days of rain. I looked up for just a moment to find the next trail marker, and it was then that my foot slipped. I shouldn’t have tried to take a step while looking up, but I did, and I fell hard, my 40+ pound backpack pulling me down like an upside down pendulum onto sharp knives of rock. The damage, luckily, was minimal. I have various bruises covering the right side of my body (“I swear, officer, my wife didn’t beat me up THIS time…”), and my right arm is just a tad too sore to be of much use. As it was raining, the Nikon was hung around my neck, and though it too smashed into a hard rock, it came out rather less damaged than I.