In May 2025, I stayed for a week in a small cottage in Tálknafjörður, in the Westfjords of Iceland. I worked during the day, but the evenings stretched out in front of me; long hours of low, golden light, the kind that made it impossible for me to stay indoors.
So each evening, I snapped the laptop shut, got in the car, and drove out towards Látrabjarg.
The road followed the edge of Patreksfjörður before turning to gravel and climbing towards the black cliffs. It felt like a journey to the edge of the world: Sea, sky, rock, weather, and a small lighthouse standing at the westernmost point of Iceland.
For four evenings in a row, the wind howled.
It was hard to open the car door, and harder still to stand upright. Holding a camera steady? Well, good luck with that… But it hardly mattered. Where there should have been puffins, there were nuffins. They were either tucked into their burrows or out at sea, invisible except for the empty cliff tops.
On the fifth evening, everything changed.
The wind had dropped to nothing late in the afternoon, and I arrived in the golden hour; which, in Iceland in mid-May, is hours long; a slow spilling of light across the evening as the sun dips.
The cliff tops were packed full of puffins.
They were everywhere. Standing in the grass, gathered in small groups, paired off at the cliff edge, lit by the low sun. After four evenings of nuffin, their presence felt almost unreal.
I sat down by the cliff edge by Bjargtangar lighthouse and quickly became absorbed watching them.
They preened. They rubbed beaks. They nodded and shuffled and settled. They nudged each other. Waddled around quietly. Nestled. There was no urgency or hurry. They seemed entirely at home in the calm, as if they’d been waiting for the wind to stop and the light to soften.
For the longest time, I did not lift the camera.
I just sat there, feeling the sun drop lower and the air quieten around us. The puffins carried on with their evening, unbothered by me, absorbed in their stuff.
Eventually, I picked up the camera.
I am not sure what the trigger was for moving from watching to photographing, exactly, but the calm unbothered atmosphere was settled enough that I wanted to keep a little of it. The golden grass. The bright faces in the long light. The stillness after days of wind.
I had come looking for puffins.
What I found, when they finally appeared, was the quiet joy and gentle humour of being allowed to sit among them for a while.