People abroad sometimes ask me how dark it actually is here in the wintertime. They ask, What time does it get dark? They never think to ask what time it gets light. So, to illustrate how the solstice works in Iceland's capital, here is a series of pics I took on the shortest day of the year, December 21, 2002.

I wasn't being very scientific about the process. By that I mean I didn't take pictures at regular time intervals, and I didn't use the same exposure for each image and I didn't put my tripod in exactly the same spot each time. I don't even have the exact times of each picture as the clock on my camera had inadvertently been reset. I just went out and snapped a shot every so often, between the hours of 9AM and 5PM and adjusted the exposure to capture how it actually looked to me in real life.

The pics in the top row were taken between 9:00 and 10:30. The middle row goes from 10:30 to around 12:00 noon. I figured that was about as bright as it was going to get, so I went out Christmas shopping at that point. I came back around 3:00 and shot the bottom row from 3:00 until 5:00 PM.

Sunrise in Reykjavik was at 11:22 am and sunset at 3:29 pm. As you can see, it was overcast, so we never actually saw the sun that day. It was also a full moon that night, but we didn't see much of it either!