Iceland in Summer for Photographers

An hour at Dettifoss that summer gave us for free

In the summer of 2020, we reached the east bank of Dettifoss on a day of genuinely good weather — a road that’s often closed, often rough, and usually rewards you with a scattering of other visitors even when it’s open. That day, there was almost no one there. We sat down at the edge, close enough to feel the spray on calm gusts, and stayed for an hour. Not shooting constantly. Mostly just sitting with the sound and the scale of it — Europe’s most powerful waterfall, and for that hour, close to ours alone.

I didn’t fully understand how rare that was until this year, watching footage of a summer queue forming at Gljúfrabúi — a waterfall that used to be a genuine secret. Iceland’s summer of 2020 was unlike any other summer before or since, for reasons that had nothing to do with photography and everything to do with a closed border. What that summer showed me, though, is worth carrying into any summer visit: this is the season when Iceland is most crowded, and also the season with the most daylight, the most access, and — if you plan around the crowds rather than through them — still real opportunities for solitude.

This guide is built from that summer and from summers since, on the technique, the timing, and the honest trade-offs of shooting Iceland between June and August.

The Defining Feature: The Midnight Sun

From late May through late July, the sun in Iceland barely sets. In Reykjavík, official sunset might read close to midnight, but true darkness never arrives — the sky holds a soft, extended twilight through the night before brightening again toward a sunrise that isn’t far behind it.

Season Overview

Summer — what it gives and what it doesn’t

Summer gives you

Midnight sun Extended golden light from late May through late July. Low sun angle available for hours, not minutes.

Full F-road and highland access Landmannalaugar, Kerlingarfjöll, Kjölur — only realistically reachable from June onward.

Puffins Látrabjarg, Borgarfjörður Eystri, Arnardrangur — active May through August, peak June–July.

Waterfalls at maximum flow Summer meltwater keeps rivers high. Dynjandi and Dettifoss are most powerful now.

All accommodation open Remote guesthouses that close for winter are running. Multi-region trips are more flexible.

More settled weather More stable than winter — but still Iceland. Check vedur.is daily regardless.

Summer doesn’t give you

Northern Lights The sky never gets dark enough. If aurora is any part of your goal, this is not your season.

Ice caves Vatnajökull ice caves are structurally unsafe once temperatures rise. Winter only.

Quiet at famous locations Reynisfjara, Seljalandsfoss, Jökulsárlón, the Golden Circle — at peak crowding exactly when the light is technically best.

Autumn’s dramatic light quality Flat midday light is more common in summer than in autumn or winter. The golden hours are long but not all day.

Low prices and easy availability Peak season means peak rates. Car rental and accommodation both hit their annual high in July–August.

Mývatn without midges Summer midge swarms at Mývatn peak in July and August. A head net is standard kit, not optional.

Summer is the right season if: puffins, highland F-road access, or the midnight sun experience are central to your trip. It is the wrong season if aurora, ice caves, or solitude at Iceland’s famous locations are what you’re primarily after. For photographers who’ve already done a summer trip, autumn delivers a fundamentally different experience — and one that many find more rewarding for landscape photography specifically.

For photographers, this changes the entire rhythm of a day. The golden hour doesn’t last twenty minutes at dawn and dusk — it stretches, softens, and reappears at hours that feel deeply strange the first time you experience them.

My own experience with this comes with a caveat worth naming. The image accompanying this article — Kvernufoss, a quieter neighbour to Skógafoss tucked into its own canyon just behind the Skógar Museum — was taken at 23:30 in late May, in light that had the warmth of evening without any of the darkness that would normally follow it. That was a deliberate late-night session, and the light rewarded it.

But on the 2020 trip that gave us the hour at Dettifoss, we mostly slept at normal hours instead. That wasn’t a missed opportunity so much as a deliberate one: with the border effectively closed and almost no one else travelling, the usual reason to chase 2am light — escaping daytime crowds — simply didn’t apply. We had quiet locations available in ordinary daylight, so we used ordinary hours.

In a normal summer, that calculation changes. Shooting through the night to catch empty light is a genuinely effective strategy — but it’s also one plenty of other photographers have already worked out. A 2am session at a well-known waterfall can still mean sharing it with several tripods set up around you, especially at locations already established as “the place to shoot the midnight sun.” The advantage isn’t automatic; it depends on where you go, not just when.

Midnight Sun

How to actually use the light — in practice

Late May Light window Sun barely sets. Extended golden hour from ~10pm through ~4am. Twilight rather than true darkness.

June Peak midnight sun No darkness at all. The sky holds warmth through the night. The most extreme version of the phenomenon.

Late July Transitioning Brief, soft darkness returning. Aurora becomes faintly possible from mid-August onward — not reliable, but not impossible.

The light — what it actually means

The low sun angle produces warm, raking light for hours — not just at “golden hour” This is the season’s biggest photographic advantage. It applies to a much longer window than the midnight label suggests.

You don’t have to shoot at 2am specifically to benefit A 6pm session, a 10pm session, and a 5am session can all produce equivalent light quality in June.

The midnight sessions at famous locations are not secret Other photographers know about 2am at Seljalandsfoss. You may still share it with several tripods.

Less-visited locations at unusual hours are the real opportunity An obscure waterfall at 11pm may be entirely yours. A famous one probably won’t be.

Planning your sessions

Plan one or two late sessions — not a nocturnal schedule for the whole trip Sustainable shooting over ten days beats two extraordinary nights followed by exhaustion on the road.

Choose your late-night locations before you arrive Decide in advance which locations are worth a midnight session — you won’t make good decisions when tired at 11pm.

Sleep when the light is flat — not during golden hours Midday in Iceland in June can be genuinely flat and harsh. That’s the time to rest, not the extended evenings.

Check vedur.is before committing a night session to a specific location Cloud cover at 11pm is common. An evening check at 9pm saves a wasted drive.

The 2020 lesson: on a trip when almost no one else was in Iceland, the midnight sun advantage — escaping crowds via unusual hours — simply didn’t apply. We had quiet locations in ordinary daylight and used ordinary hours. In a normal summer, the calculation is different. The extended light is a genuine tool — but it’s a tool for managing crowds, not a substitute for choosing the right locations in the first place.

Practical notes for shooting the midnight sun:

Late May through late July gives the most extended light; June is peak.
The sun’s low angle for hours means long shadows and warm tones are available far more of the day than the label “midnight sun” suggests — you don’t have to be shooting at 2am specifically to benefit from this season’s light quality.
Plan one or two late sessions rather than committing to a nocturnal schedule for the whole trip, unless you’re confident you’ll actually sustain it. A tired photographer on unfamiliar roads the next day is a worse trade than the image was worth.
There is no Northern Lights potential in summer — the sky never gets dark enough. If aurora is part of your goal, this isn’t the season.

Maximum Access — What Summer Opens Up

Summer is the only season when Iceland’s full road network, including the F-roads into the highlands, is realistically open. This is the single biggest practical advantage of shooting in June through August.

F-roads and the highlands. Locations like Landmannalaugar and Kerlingarfjöll — covered in the F-Roads guide — are only accessible once the highland routes open, typically from June, conditions dependent. If highland photography is a goal, summer is your only realistic window.

Puffins. The puffin colonies at Látrabjarg, Borgarfjörður Eystri, and Arnardrangur are active from May through August, with peak numbers in June and July. This is entirely a summer subject — arrive in autumn, as I did on one trip, and the cliffs are simply empty. Full technique is in the Puffin Photography guide.

Waterfalls at maximum flow. Summer meltwater keeps rivers running high, which means waterfalls across the country are at or near their most powerful. This matters for locations like Dynjandi and Dettifoss, where the volume of water is itself part of the spectacle.

Every accommodation option, open. Guesthouses in remote regions that close for winter are running at full capacity. This makes multi-region trips more flexible, though it also means booking further in advance — see below.

The Cost of Access: Crowds

This is the honest trade-off, and it’s worth being direct about it rather than glossing past it the way some guides do.

Summer is Iceland’s peak tourist season by a wide margin. The locations covered across this site that see the heaviest pressure — Reynisfjara, Seljalandsfoss, the Golden Circle, Jökulsárlón’s car park — are at their most crowded exactly when the light is technically best for shooting them. Car parks fill, tour buses run on tight schedules that put dozens of visitors at the same viewpoint within the same twenty minutes, and the quiet, unhurried photography this site generally advocates for becomes genuinely harder to find without deliberate effort.

What deliberate effort looks like in practice:

Shoot early or very late, using the extended light rather than the conventional golden hour window everyone else is also chasing. A 5am arrival at a popular location can mean having it almost to yourself, even in July.
Weight your itinerary toward the regions this site already steers you toward — the Westfjords, the east, Snæfellsnes beyond Kirkjufell. These see a fraction of the south coast’s summer traffic even at peak season.
Accept that some famous locations will simply have people in them. Reynisfjara in July is not going to be empty. Plan your composition and your expectations around that reality rather than fighting it.
Watch for the “hidden gem gone viral” pattern. Kvernufoss, in the image above, remains genuinely quiet specifically because Skógafoss absorbs the crowd a few hundred metres away. That balance can shift — the Geotagging guide covers exactly this dynamic, and it’s worth reading before you decide what to share from your own summer trip.

Mývatn’s Midges — A Summer-Specific Warning

The Mývatn guide on this site covers this in detail, but it deserves repeating here because it’s a distinctly summer phenomenon that catches people off guard. Lake Mývatn’s midge swarms — the source of its name — peak in summer, and in some recent years have returned in genuinely dense numbers after periods of decline. A head net is not an overreaction; it’s standard kit for a summer Mývatn visit. Most of the swarm is harmless lake midges rather than the biting black fly species, but neither is pleasant in the quantities this region can produce in July and August.

Booking and Planning for Summer

Summer’s popularity has practical consequences beyond crowded viewpoints:

Accommodation books out early, particularly in July and August, and particularly in smaller towns with limited guesthouse capacity. Book significantly further ahead than you would for shoulder-season travel.
Car rental prices peak alongside demand. If your dates are flexible, late May or early September (technically shoulder season but close enough to summer conditions for most purposes) can offer meaningfully better rates and thinner crowds while keeping most of summer’s access advantages.
Weather is genuinely more settled than other seasons, but “more settled” in Iceland still means checking Veðurstofa Íslands daily — see the Weather & Planning Tools guide for the full routine.

What Summer Cannot Give You

Being clear about the season’s limits matters as much as its strengths:

No Northern Lights. The sky doesn’t get dark enough, full stop.
No ice caves. These are a winter-only phenomenon in Vatnajökull, structurally unsafe once temperatures rise.
Less dramatic, more even light for most of the day, outside the extended golden hours — the flat midday light that photographers elsewhere try to avoid is genuinely more common here than in autumn or winter.
The crowds, discussed above, at the country’s best-known locations.

None of this makes summer the wrong season — it makes it a different tool for a different job. If puffins, highland access, or the specific experience of shooting at 2am in golden light are what you’re after, summer is the only season that delivers them.

My Honest Take

Given the choice, autumn remains my personal favourite — covered in full in the Autumn guide on this site. But summer gave me that hour at Dettifoss, sitting in near-silence at one of the most powerful waterfalls in Europe, in a year when Iceland briefly had far fewer visitors than usual. That specific circumstance won’t repeat. What can repeat, in any summer, is the discipline behind it: arrive early, look past the famous stops, and be willing to let a quiet hour at one location outweigh a checklist of five.

Sources

Veðurstofa Íslands (Icelandic Meteorological Office) — vedur.is
Vegagerðin (Icelandic Road Administration) — road.is
Ferðamálastofa (Icelandic Tourist Board) — visiticeland.com

Iceland in Summer for Photographers: Midnight Sun & Maximum Access