Appendix 1 - More of Reykjavik

Back from Iceland and I'm going through the thousand plus photos and spending a bit more time on processing them now I have more time available.  In the appendices part of blog I am just going to include ones not appearing previously although I will probably reprocess most of the photos from the original blog too and put the best ones on my website.  There may be more appendices than original posts depending on how it goes but in this first one I am using photos from the first day in Reykjavik.

I'll start with a photo of Hallgrimskirkja Church because it is such an iconic piece of architecture.  For this photo I chose an angle looking across the front face of the building which I haven't seen much on thee internet before but I think it works quite well.  To be honest it's hard to find and uninteresting angle to look at this building, I love the simplicity and the sweeping blockiness of the design.

I also made this photograph because the rear of the church doesn't appear much on the internet. That is a shame because I think the the curves of the almost mosque-like rear makes a strange contrast to the angularity of the rest of the church.

The inside of the church is just as stark and grey as the outside.  There are very few statues or paintings around the walls and aisles within the church.  The one striking item in the church is the array of organ pipes above the entrance to the church.  While we were there there was a young lady playing the organ and filling the church with beautiful music.

We took the lift up the tower of the church which let us out in the area behind the clocks.  Each one had a different set of pictures around but all of them was damaged or had words scraped into it.  This one was the least damaged.  It was quite interesting to see the electric clockwork in the centre.  All very different to the clocks in the big churches and cathedrals in England.

From the clock hall was a few flights of stairs up to the level where there were windows on all sides of the tower.  Out of the windows were some great views over the city and across the bay to the mountains.  Here's a photo across the bay with the mountains lit up by the early evening (1:30 pm) sun and the low clouds obscuring the peaks.

After leaving the church we made our way back down to the harbour where we had parked the car. I was interested in seeing the Imagine Peace Tower which is on an island in the bay but during the day there's not much to see from the city because it isn't lit up.  We had planned to return to Reykjavik in the evening one day to see it.  What we did find next to the harbour was the Sun Voyager statue which is very photogenic, so I took loads of photos from lots of different angles.

After taking a portrait photograph I just have to make a landscape one from a slightly different angle.

One more after undergoing a black and white processing.

In the original blog entry I included a photo including this statue but from a distance so I felt it was OK to use this one in the appendices.

I'll continue to work through processing more of my photos and make another post in a few days.