Bruarfoss, my take on one of my favorite waterfalls in Iceland

January 14, 2019

I traveled to Iceland with my now wife back in February of 2016 and had an amazing time. I am so looking forward to going back when the weather is warmer and I’ll be posting a full write up about the trip (where I went, what I saw, what to expect) later. There are so many amazing waterfalls in Iceland, but I want to focus on one in particular, Bruarfoss. This was my favorite waterfall that we visited while in Iceland due to its unique blue hue. It was also the only waterfall that wasn’t full of tourists. In fact it was so remote that my wife and I were the only ones there.

Getting there

Bruarfoss is a ways off the beaten path and is not the easiest place to get to, especially in winter. Directions to this location are difficult to find and vague at best. I had an approximate location and when we got there, we turned into what appeared to be a vacation home complex. Once I got off the main road, I was very happy to have rented a 4×4 SUV. The snow was roughly a foot deep and we almost got stuck trying to turn around at the end of the road. Since no one was around to get us out, getting stuck would not have been a good start to our trip.

Once we parked at the end of the road, we walked over to the nearby river to try to find the waterfall. Since nothing was marked, we walked along this river through the knee high snow in search of Bruarfoss. We walked around for roughly 40 minutes before deciding to go back to the car because I could not find this damn waterfall. When we got to the spot in the river where we had parked the car, I spotted a trail of rocks that spanned the river we had been following. Looking across the river there appeared to be a break in the brush that could be a path. My wife an I decided to give it a shot and cross the rocks to see if this path would lead us to Bruarfoss

We had to cross this river to get to the waterfall

Eureka, that was it! We wasted 40 minutes trudging through deep snow when all we needed to do was cross the river right where we started. After that, we walked about a half mile down a path to find this incredible waterfall.

Found Bruarfoss!

This is the straight out of camera file of Bruarfoss

This is the straight out of camera shot. Since it was shot in raw, the color pallet is a bit flat for what it was like when we were there. In my editing, I wanted to bring out the blue of the water. I boosted the saturation(a bit too high) and cropped the image down to remove the areas of the image clouded from condensation on my lens.

After making my global adjustments in Lightroom, I switched over to Photoshop in order to add some more interest in the sky. The shadow created by the falling sun inspired me to add more sunset like properties to the image. I decided to add some clouds and a color shift to make it more reminiscent of a sunset.

After finishing the work in Photoshop, I switch back over to Lightroom to make my final adjustments. The following three images are what I landed on for my final work. Since I couldn’t decide on which one I liked the best, I’ve made all three available. Let me know which one is your favorite!