The first thing Reykjavik does to a photographer is rearrange your relationship with the sun. I arrived in early December once expecting “short days” and was unprepared for what that actually meant — the sun rose around 11am, scraped along the horizon for a few hours, and was gone by 3:30. Every shot I took that week was a golden-hour shot, because golden hour was the entire day.
Six months later, in June, I came back. The sun went down around midnight and back up around three, and in between sat a long blue twilight where the light shifted by tiny degrees for hours. My sleep schedule was destroyed and my photographs were better than anything I’d taken in the dark.
Reykjavik is a small city — you can walk across it in an hour — but it has more weather, more sky, and more dramatic light than cities ten times its size. Here’s how to actually shoot it.
How the City Shoots
Reykjavik is low. Most buildings are two or three stories, painted in saturated colors that pop against the gray sea and the snow-capped Esja range across the bay. That low skyline means the sky is always doing most of the work in your composition. If the sky is dull, the photograph will be too — and you should probably wait it out or change subject. If the sky is dramatic, almost any composition will read.
The colored corrugated metal walls are a gift. Pick a 35mm or 50mm and just walk neighborhoods like Þingholt or the streets behind Hallgrímskirkja. The juxtapositions — a yellow wall against a teal door against a red roof — happen every block. Shoot tight, let the color do the work.
For wide cityscapes, you really only have a few elevated angles: the Hallgrímskirkja tower, Perlan, and the slope of Skólavörðustígur looking down toward the harbor. Use them all.
Getting Around With a Camera
You don’t need a car for the city. Walking covers Hallgrímskirkja, Harpa, the harbor, Tjörnin, and Laugavegur in one long loop. For Grótta and Perlan, the city bus network (Strætó) works, or a short taxi if your shooting window is tight.
If you want to do a day trip to Cape Reykjanes, the Golden Circle, or the south coast — and you should, the photography out there is some of the best in the world — rent a car. A small front-wheel-drive is fine in summer; in winter, get a 4x4 with proper studded tires and check road.is every morning.
Layer for wind, not temperature. Reykjavik in summer hits maybe 12-15°C but the wind off the Atlantic makes it feel like 5. Winter goes the other way — relatively mild for the latitude (often hovering near freezing) but with brutal wind chill that drains batteries and freezes fingers fast.
Light and Weather by Season
Late spring (April-May) and early autumn (September-October) are the most balanced for photography. You get full normal day-night cycles, long real golden hours and blue hours, the highest chance of dramatic skies, and (in September-October) early aurora. This is when I’d come if I had one trip.
Summer (June-August) is the midnight sun period. The light is soft for many hours, but you lose true blue hour and you lose contrast. Long exposures lose a lot of their drama because the sky is never really dark. Great for landscapes outside the city, harder for moody cityscapes.
Winter (November-February) is the aurora season but also the brutal-weather season. Storms can cancel your shooting day with no warning. When the weather works, the photographs are extraordinary. When it doesn’t, you sit in a cafe. Be honest with yourself about how much weather you can absorb before it ruins the trip.
Permits, Tripods, and Etiquette
Public space photography is open and uncomplicated. Tripods are fine on the harbor, at Grótta, in the streets — just don’t block pedestrian flow. Inside Harpa, photography in the public foyer is allowed but not during private events; staff will tell you if it’s a no.
Hallgrímskirkja allows handheld photography inside the church and from the tower for a small admission fee. Be quiet during services.
If you photograph the colored houses people actually live in, keep your distance and don’t put faces in private windows in the frame. Icelanders are friendly but the city is small enough that “I saw a tourist photograph my kitchen” is a real conversation people have.
For aurora work at Grótta, use a red headlamp and stay off the lighthouse property itself — the causeway is the public area. White headlamps will get you sworn at by every other photographer there.
Final Frame
My favorite Reykjavik photograph isn’t of the church or the harbor. It’s of a yellow wooden house on Bergstaðastræti at 2am in June, lit by a sky that was somehow both pink and blue at the same time, with no one on the street and a single bicycle leaning against the fence. f/4, 1/60s, ISO 400. It looked like nothing while I was shooting it and like a memory when I got home.
The trick to Reykjavik is to stop trying to make the sky behave and start letting it lead. Show up, layer up, and shoot the light you actually get — not the light you imagined on the flight over.