Day 1:  Nothing happened.  I arrived in the country, at the hotel, rested, met the people on the workshop.  I only included it here to avoid confusing people by starting these posts with Day 2.

So, instead of including photos of Day 1, I'll include some background.

Iceland is a volcanic island.  It exists because the North America plate and the Europe plate are moving away from each other.  Iceland is the only place where this is above sea level.  It compares in two interesting ways to Minnesota.  First, it is almost exactly have the size of the state.  And, where Minnesota has 10,000+ lakes, Iceland has 10,000+ waterfalls.

Being volcanic, the country gets heat and power from geothermal or hydraulic sources.  Interestingly, the water actually needs to be cooled in order to be usable in the home (for washing, bathing, etc.).

It also occurred to me (while standing in line at customs) that, since there is only one airport in Iceland (outside of some airstrip/hanger operations) basically all flights are international.

When trying to read or pronounce place names (and other words in general), the two letters that will throw people off because they don't exist in English are  ð (eth) and  þ (thorn).  Eth is pronounced like the th in father (but things like Google substitute a D when trying to write names/words using the Latin alphabet).  Thorn is pronounced like the th in, well, thorn.  J is generally pronounced as Y.

I will be including place names in as they appear in Iceland.  When a place is known by the English name (like Diamond Beach) I will include both.  A lot of the Icelandic names include suffixes that indicate the type of feature it is, which is why I won't include the English name/type.  First is -fell/-fjall, which means a mountain or hill or fell.  So referring to a place like Kirkjufell as Mount Kirjufell is redundant. Another common one is -foss (waterfall) which means that Kirkjufellfoss could have ended up doubly redundant (Mount Kirkjufell Falls).  Some other suffixes are -jökull (glacier), -vik (bay or cove, as in Reykjavik), and -dalur (valley).

Finally, a note on photo processing.  I am not skilled enough in Photoshop or Lightroom to add anything to a photo, so everything in the ensuing photos was always part of the photo.  I will, however, remove things that shouldn't have been there in the first place.  That might include people who wandered into the photo at an inopportune time, distracting item like twigs or garbage or cars, or anything else that detracts from the image.  I also don't change colors except through standard settings (like white balance, saturation, etc.) unless you count converting to black and white.