Captured the perfect shot of Keilir after midnight

Hörður Kristleifsson, who is a 23 year old photographer, has for quite a few years dreamt about capturing the perfect shot of the mountain Keilir in the Reykjanes peninsula. In his mind the perfect shot would be capturing the top of the mountain surrounded by a floor of clouds. Keilir is not a tall mountain, only 379 meters above sea level, and therefore it is a rare occurrence to see a "floor of clouds" surrounding the top.

"The first time I hiked up Keilir and stood at the top I imagined how cool it would be to get a picture of myself above the clouds with the tip of the mountain reaching above the clouds. After a few times trying it out over the span of a few years I finally captured the shot and the result is this photograph," he says in a conversation with mbl.is.

Quite a feat

Hörður went hiking up Keilir at 8:30 PM on the 20th of June, but the weather forecast was somewhat positive for cloud formations during the evening. When he got to the top around 10 PM there were no clouds close to Keilir, but he used the time to photograph until the sun sat at midnight. After sunset he just waited patiently on the top until he saw a layer of clouds coming close to Keilir just after 1 AM. Just before the clock struck 2 AM the top of Keilir was surrounded by clouds.

"Then I sent the drone up and captured my dream shot. It was at the summer solstice so it was light and bright outside, and the sky was on fire," he says and adds that because of the height of the mountain it is quite tricky to get a shot like this.

Hörður has been focusing on photographing Icelandic landscape for the last few years and especially by using a drone. He has a 513 thousand people following him on Instagram where he shares his photographs with his followers.

Leit út fyr­ir að vera í gígn­um

He has a list of locations where he wants to photograph during the Icelandic bright summer when it is bright all night long which and you get a light that has a magical light and quality. He practises hiking during the night to capture the sun setting and coming up.

"I have a few photographs I want to take on my bucket list. The photograph of Keilir was one of those, and another one is of Karlinn on the Reykjanes peninsula. In the year of 2020 I hiked up Kirkjufell in Grundarfjörður at the summer solstice and at the same time last summer I hiked up Lómagnúpur in the southern part of Iceland."

Like many other Icelanders he did not stay away from the volcanic eruption in Fagradalsfjall and he says he hiked there around 30 times.

"The most memorable moment by the volcano was on the 30th of April 2021 when the crater was in constant magma jet activity. At this moment I was standing approximately in a 200 meters distance from the crater and was watching the shots of lava plundering into the air up to hundreds of meters. I decided to take a shot and positioned the camera with a zoomlense on a tripod, maybe a 100 meters from where I was standing. That way, the zoom lense made it look like I was standing  directly in front of the crater, when in fact I was in a safe distance."