I'm not here because Iceland is beautiful. I'm here because it's home.

How I Got Here

In 2018 I bought a plane ticket to Iceland having never heard the voice of the person I was flying to meet. Two and a half weeks of messages on Tinder. Never a phone call. I flew anyway.

He organised the whole trip — a half-cabin half-camper through snow in May, a blizzard on the ferry to Vestmannaeyjar, a sunny day on an island that I still think about. I stood on that ferry in the middle of the North Atlantic, looked at the map on my phone, and took a screenshot just to prove to myself it was real. I had never felt so alive and so completely out of my depth at the same time.

I fell in love with both Sten and Iceland on that trip. A week after I got back to Estonia, he quit his job and moved into my apartment. One month from first message to living together. Some decisions don't need time to be right.

We always said we'd move to Iceland one day. In January 2023 I came back for a winter visit with our two kids — hot tubs, closed roads, a blizzard that cancelled our plans and made better ones. Sitting there I thought: why are we still waiting? We went back to Estonia, sold the car, fixed up the house, sold it too, and packed up everything we had. It took until September. The most stressful stretch of my life, and absolutely the right call.

I've lived abroad before — Canada for a while, and Sten had done New Zealand, Denmark, Iceland the first time. It always pulled us back to Estonia. This time is different. Iceland feels like the place I was supposed to end up.

How I work

You should never wonder what to do next.

That discomfort — standing somewhere beautiful not knowing what to do with your hands — ruins photos faster than bad weather. My job is to make sure it never happens. I give prompts: walk this way, tell each other something, keep moving. You're never left standing there wondering. After about twenty minutes, the camera stops being a thing you're aware of.

I watch for your comfort as much as I watch for the light. The photos that matter most aren't the ones where you look your best — they're the ones where you're actually somewhere together.

Why me

I'm not flying in for this.

I live here. Through the dark months, the road closures, the summers where the light never really goes. Most of our weekends are spent somewhere outside Reykjavík with the kids — a cabin, a tent, a drive that goes further than we planned because there was a road worth following. That's where I learn the places I send you to. Not off a list.

So when I tell you somewhere is worth the extra forty minutes, or that the famous one will have three tour buses parked at it by ten in the morning, it's because I've stood there on an ordinary Tuesday with a thermos and two kids in the back of the car.

The rest is care. I answer the questions that have nothing to do with photography — where to eat, what to wear, whether the camper van is a good idea. I edit every image myself. And I would rather you had a day you actually enjoyed than a set of photographs where you look like someone told you where to stand.