Dynjandi as a Photography Location

認証済み現地在住者

I was a bit hesitant to visit this waterfall since it’s located very remote and deep into the Westfjords and I didn’t really feel it had the same power to it like Skogafoss or Dettifoss. That hesitation was brought to shame the second I saw Dynjandi.

Dynjandi means thunderous in Icelandic and you understand the name when you’re standing next to the waterfall and getting dwarfed by the sheer size of it! It’s incredible… no other word can describe it.

Dynjandi is located deep into the Westfjords and it’s a five hours drive up there if the conditions of the roads are good. But it’s well worth it – even if you’re only there to visit Dynjandi. To find it follow road 1 from Reykjavik towards the north. Turn left at road 60 and stay on that until you see the waterfall.

There’s literally like two roads in the Westfjords so it’s not the hardest place to find, it just takes a lot of time, but the road up there is a huge experience in itself. Sometimes it feels like you’re driving on top of the world.

Dynjandi is actually a cascade of smaller waterfalls with a collective drop of 100m. Beneath Dynjandi there are another six waterfalls of varying size. You park at the bottom and follow a hike up along the smaller waterfalls to get to Dynjandi.

For me the obvious shot was a straight on long exposure of Dynjandi, with the 3rd waterfall from the top called Strompgljúfrafoss as a foreground and a person on the plateau in front of Dynjandi to show the scale.

And that’s something I want to emphasize a lot. Putting in that human element in the landscape really makes a lot of difference to how the viewer perceives the image. When you do long exposures of seascapes and waterfalls, you remove the waves from the ocean and water particles from the waterfalls, which makes it harder for the viewer to scale what he or she is looking at and that’s something to be aware of as a landscape photographer.

All the way up at Dynjandi you can make some gorgeous abstract pictures of the cascades, try out a few different focal lengths and shutter speeds, but remember something to wipe of your camera, there’s a lot of water-vapour in the air!

When you’re all the way up there, you’ll need a good wide-angle lens to photograph the entire waterfall. Shooting the waterfall up close with a 16 mm or from far away with a zoom makes a huge difference!

If you want to explore Dynjandi even further you can try to hike up the left side of the waterfall. I haven’t been at that side, but I’ve seen some amazing pictures from there.

When it comes to the lenses I’d recommend you bring every focal length you can muster. The location is huge and there’re enough compositions for many days.

I hope you enjoyed this article! I can highly recommend you to check out the video I made from this location below - there's a lot of drone footage. If you want to buy any of my pictures as beautiful high-quality prints check out my Society6 page. Also visit my website and follow me on Instagram or look through my pictures on 500px if you like!