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A Stylish Icelandic Elopement — Iceland Wedding Photography

Claire and I were expected to arrive in Iceland around midnight after a long day of travel, on our third visit to Iceland. Excited and tired, we waited in line for about an hour to pick up our trusty Icelandic rental car, and then journeyed out to Selfoss to meet Rose and Nate at the rented AirBnB we were all staying in together. Little did Claire and I know that Iceland at 1am was darker than we could even fathom. It was hard to tell where the sky started and the ground ended. Without a GPS and general directions such as “just look for the little farm near the third waterfall on your right, and then turn left, and then make your fifth right on the dirt road,” we took a little bit longer than expected to finally reach the house. Our brakes failing randomly didn’t seem to help our timing.

A text from Rose came in just before we found the place, 3 hours later than planned, “Had a quick shut eye and woke up and saw the time and I thought OMG holy shit I totally left them outside!”

Rose was relieved to hear that she didn’t strand us in the Icelandic wilderness for hours, and a few super tired hugs were exchanged. I met Nate that night in passing (we totally woke him up) where the first thing out of his mouth was, “Hi! I’m John… Wait, John’s my professional name. Hi! I’m Nate. Call me Nate.”

I called him Nate.

Rose is fiery. Hilarious. She speaks her mind and doesn’t care if you don’t agree with her. She’s my type of person. Nate is a math nerd. A solid guy who would happily contort his body into the backseat of our rented two-door Suzuki 4×4 for hours to get some good photographs. A bit quiet in comparison to Rose, but they compliment each other like black sand beaches and champagne wedding dresses (more on that later. I knew since 4:30am on that random Tuesday night that we’d all get along swimmingly. Many meals and conversations were exchanged that week and we now consider them both friends.

Rose and Nate knew that they wanted to explore Southern Iceland with us on their wedding day, so explore we did. Having already been officially married the day before in Reykjavik, the plan was to head down to Dyrhólaey (or D-Town as Rose decided to call it) where they’d exchange rings and vows on the most beautiful black sand beach. After that we fjorded a few cliffs, drove across some crazy dirt roads, chased a few waterfalls, and found the now Instagram-famous crashed DC-3 airplane. We even saw the Northern Lights. All this while barely missing the Bardarbunga volcanic eruption (it ended up erupting two weeks or so after we left).

It was a pretty crazy adventure in one of our favorite places in the world with two new friends. You really can’t beat that.

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Reykjavik, Selfoss, and Dyrhólaey. Iceland.

          Dress: Emily Riggs

          Accessories: BHLDN

Many thanks as always to Claire Hudson for helping out in documenting this. Some of her photography is mixed in above. Claire is the real deal and I’m incredibly lucky to be able to travel and work alongside someone I care about so deeply.


 

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