Oliver Bryant Photography - Blog

In 2024 me and my newly married wife returned back to Iceland. On a previous trip we went to Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon and the Diamond Beach on that trip we ended up on a large coach with a group of tourists from a cruiseline.

We loved Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon and I even got to take some amazing snaps but during the trip our guide told us about an Island that was on a former volcano that errupted in the 1970s. We decided we needed to find out more and figure out how we would get to this island.

Our first attempt

I booked an tour operator to go on a trip to the Westman Islands and 2 weeks before they emailed me to say they could no longer provide the service, This was a terrible time to get this news and I scrambled to find alternatives.

Private Taxi/Tour Guide? That will be £1500.

I went ont Viator to see if we could find an alternative to the westman islands. The offical name is “Vestmannaeyjar” so I started looking for options, a local tour guide offered to pick us up from Reykjavík, drive us to Vestmannaeyjar but they wanted £1500. I had given up hope on being able to visit this little island until…

Is it fate, is it magic?

We discovered a family tour operator called Magic Iceland Travel that provides a bus transfer service to Vestmannaeyjar for ISK 7,577 (£43/£56.90) each way. This was an absolute BARGIN in comparison to the private tour guide and allowed us to plan our own trip on the island.

Our Plan

1. Get Bus Transfer from Reykjavík to Landeyjahöfn

2. Get Ferry Tickets from herjolfur

3. Use the tourist hop-on/hop-off coach service to hop around the island.

4. See Puffins

5. See Whales

What we ended up doing…

1. Visited the museum

2. Saw Puffins

3. Saw Whales

4. Hiked the (non-active) Volcano

5. Went back and saw the Puffins again.

6. Had Pizza

7. Went back on the Ferry and got driven back to the hotel by Magic Travel Iceland.

That’s the TL;DR but if you want more details here they are!

We got to the ferry terminal with plenty of time spare thank to Magic Iceland Travel, We then got the ferry over to the Island and got onto the coach. We got to see a few different sites until we got to the Puffins. This is the place I took a lot of my Puffin photos, The coach then took us to the Eldheimar Museum which explains what happened in 1973, it’s an incredible experience to be up close to a property that had been previously engulfed in lava. Once we left the Museum we decided to Hike the Volcano, I loved the views! We then visited the Sealife Whales and we could hear them talking to us but the pitch was so high that others standing around us couldn’t hear them and thought we was slightly mad… The Whale came over to us and showed us his toy (a plastic shovel). After this we decided to go and see the Puffins again, My wife at this point had discovered the island’s only taxi service and we was very grateful for their assistance as they helped me go visit the puffins one last time. We returned back to the port, grabbed a quick pizza and hopped back onto the Ferry. The shots I took of the “loneiest island in the world” was taken on our trip back to the Bus.

If you are travelling to Iceland in August and you want to do something different, I would recommend Vestmannaeyjar. You can easily do your own thing on the island without the need of having to spend more on a mini bus and you get more freedom to do what you want.

Please note that the services/companies I have mentioned on this post are services I used for my travels and not a direct endorsement or advertisement of services. I paid for the trip out of my own money but wanted to share how I did this trip in case others want to try and do the same!

I have just returned from the Photography and Video Show hosted at ExCel London.

I went on Sunday 9th March 2025 and had a plan of action ready to go.

• I was going to buy a new camera lens.
• I was going to see how much I could get a ricoh gr iii for.
• I needed lens filters and cleaning fluid and a spudz lens cleaner cloth
• I wanted to meet some of the suppliers behind my print shop to ensure i was happy with them.

First off I visited one of my suppliers. They had just a single person attending their booth and as I tried to talk to them about paper options another member of the public came over and tried to talk to the representative who decided to talk to them. I tried to come back a few times to check their stool out but they didn’t leave me with a very good impression. I decided to visit some competitors and they seemed to give me the time to talk about what they could do! So more options is only a good thing in my books!

Wex, London Camera Group and Camera World all had massive stools offering discounts.

I picked up UX filters for half price, I got Tamron 70-300mm F/4.5-6.3 Di III RXD Lens for £563, I found it online for £649

I went over to the ricoh Japan booth and I finally caved in and decided I wanted a ricoh camera. If you haven’t stumbled across Ricoh cameras they tend to be a favourite among the street photographers as they are small compact and easy to point and shoot. They also are amazing in night time photography scenarios so I was particularly keen on getting one!

In the end I went to a couple of vendors and settled with Wex. They had the GR III for £854 during the show which is considerable as the RRP is £949 online!

I tried to buy cleaning fluid but it wasn’t for sale during the conference and the spudz micro fibre I love so much wasn’t for sale either however many booths offered free swag that tended to include free camera cloths!

I really enjoyed the show but I wanted to touch on an area that was a tad more sensitive.

As a landscape and wildlife photographer there is nothing more I love than supporting the wildlife and caring for it. There are some amazing charities that do amazing work around this. One of the charities was featured at the event and I fondly remember going to one of their nature reserves as a school child. I wanted to donate to them but was told they only wanted to do monthly financial commitments. Upon returning later to the area the same person said very sternly “what did you buy at the event?” This was very pushy and uncalled for so I decided to avoid certain areas. My wife also experienced some pushy sales tactics which made us avoid certain areas typically these would be your top-ship style booths with products that had been brought to the conference to be sold at a high mark-up.

Overall it was a very good event and if your trying to get some kit it’s probably the best place to grab it at a discount rate that being said I would always say try and get things second hand. I noticed the lean I got today I could have grabbed online a lot cheaper if I had opted to go second hand! For me this experience was more about finding new potential suppliers but pushy sales people made it a bit more difficult, in my normal profession I’ve attended conferences before and said the lines “I don’t have purchasing authority” and that seems to do the trick, I don’t think that works at these kind of conference’s so your best bet is to just ignore them.

Would I return to this show again? Absolutely.

Travel

• Elizabeth Line was down til 14:00.
• DLR was super packed due to the three exhibitions on.
• Uber tried to charge us £60 for a taxi from ExCeL to London Waterloo. We opted for the IFS Cable Car which took 20 minutes to queue for, then a mad dash when getting onto the car due to impatient people behind us, followed by Tube.
• Limited trains due to maintenance on Sundays.

Me and the Mrs went for a nice walk around Leeds Castle again on Sunday and I was able to take some really cool photos of Swans, Goose and an Owl at the Falconary in a new gallery I’ve called “Birds of Leeds Castle” if your into birds then this is the gallery for you… Don’t worry I haven’t become a bird twitcher just yet but I do enjoy photographing wild life as they never stay still your waiting for the perfect moment and also dealing with other factors like children running around.

I’m very grateful my Mrs was with me as I wasn’t aware of the Seagulls looming over me hoping for a tasty snack. The blackbird was the best surprise for us, he just landed near me let me take the photo I thanked him and off he went, what a pro!

I have released a new gallery focusing on photography of Leeds Castle I got to see the very first sign of spring incoming!

Now I think it’s a good time to discuss my plans for 2025. I’m planning to visit 4 countries in 2025 and you’re coming along with me! I’m not going to say what they are just yet but needless to say I’ll update the blog when new galleries drop.

You can subscribe to the blog via rss or sign up to alerts at the bottom of the blog.

Thanks!

Oliver

Since my last post, I have done further research into the “Ad account disabled” and “Insufficient Funds”….

Now it seems like some of you seem to be experiencing these problems too.

Today I talked to a Meta “Enhanced” customer support representative who I’ll call “J”, Now “J” started off by telling me it was MY bank that was at fault (which it wasn’t as the Boost happily was taken by Meta via Apple Pay).

So I’ve discovered why my ad account was disabled, it took a bit of digging but I finally got to it.

In 2023 I decided to run some ads, No clue what they was or why but in the end Meta tried to take $15 from my account and couldn’t do so. In retalation Meta suspended my ability to make ads from the account.

So adding new payment information isn’t going to help in these circumstances. I was told to use a Facebook Business account, again it didn’t help. I was told to duplicate and create an ad and then hope that it will be used as default funding. No results. Someone somewhere at Meta decided I would no longer be allowed to advertise on their platform. I wasted/donated $40 to Meta in the end for this experience as they refuse to provide me a refund.

Here’s what Meta says…

“_After careful review, we regret to inform you that we're unable to take further action regarding this matter. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue.

We strive to give you the best information and tools we can provide, but we're unable to provide more assistance for this issue. If you have any new information that may help us assist you better, please feel free to contact us again for any of your billing needs._”

So if your ad account has been suspended in the past and you attempt to boost your account via Apple Pay please BEWARE. Meta will not help refund you if those funds get stuck and won’t help you. They don’t disable boosts for accounts tired to Ad accounts, no matter how many payments methods you put forward Meta doesn’t care, they have blocked you and your not invited back.

Over the last 48 hours I have had nothing but troubles with Instagram/Meta.

Let’s begin with the basics…

I decided to boost a lovely portrait I recently took just in time for international women’s day, I used mobile in-app payment to make the boost payment and things seem to be going well until I checked back a few days later…

“Ad account disabled: We were unable to place a temporary hold on your card. Try again, or update your default payment method. If you try again, make sure that your card has sufficient funds first.”

So i add a new card… green tick, refresh page

“Ad account disabled: We were unable to place a temporary hold on your card. Try again, or update your default payment method. If you try again, make sure that your card has sufficient funds first.”

I end up emailing support asking them to provide some answers as to why my account has been disabled.

“I'm sorry you're having trouble with your Instagram ad account. It looks like you've been routed to the incorrect team for this issue. Please fill out the form in the link below so we can make sure your request gets routed to the appropriate team”

The link is just to the instagram help/support area. No specific form is mentioned… things go radio silent so I decide to reward Meta with more of my money with the hopes they will either refund my original ad funds that are doing absolutely nothing or hope they will explain what’s going on…

So getting a blue tick is now a paid for option, not to be outdone by “that other guy” the verification tick could be yours for only £11.99 a month.

I begrudlingly agree to sign up to the service with the hopes of “enhanced support” but again the customer support options are extremely limited, Oh and Meta felt the need to try and get me to change the name of my Instagram page which I refused to do. They also got me to change my profile pic which again I begrudlingly accepted with the hopes I could speak to an actual human but at the end of it all…

No customer support, no resolution. Down £43.68 Thanks Zuck!

My new gallery “The City” is now open on my website.

In 2024 I took a trip to London Docklands and spent some time learning about the history of the Docklands at the London Docklands Museum. Although the area is now jammed full of high rise buildings it’s one of my favourite places in London.

The photos taken in the gallery “The City” was all taken just off the jetty that leads to the uber ferry at the Doubletree Hilton Docklands Riverside.

During the session I took over 200 shots and then decided on the final group of 5. I included one image that has “water exit” I discovered this graffiti when I was standing on the dock gate, the sign next to it showed the “fire exit” a bit of a mystery but worth capturing especially for the humour!

These are also my first shots with my brand new FujiFilm TX30 II which is a joy to use. It’s more light weight than my Nikon ZF c that I recently used in my Norway/Santorini and Iceland Gallery but the camera lenses are more expensive so it’s a trade off!

Wishing you all a happy holidays and a fantastic 2025! I’ve got trips to lots of new places planned and I can’t wait to take you along with me!

Main Gallery – Showcasing local photography, wildlife photography and my generic portfolio.

“The Sky at Night” Gallery – My “Virtual Gallery” for Astrophotography.

Iceland Gallery – My gallery dedicated to photos I took in Iceland in 2022 and 2023. This gallery also includes a “Virtual” gallery that you can explore including some 360 degree photos. Step into the Orbs to see the photo in full 360 degrees and a beautiful image of the Northern Lights taken from the Harbour.

Honeymoon Gallery – My 2024 gallery is dedicated to my Honeymoon to Iceland, Santorini and Norway. Using the Nikon ZFc Mirrorless camera with amazing close ups of Bees, Puffins and stunning landscapes and sunsets.

Prints? – If your interested in a Print please contact me. My gallery webpage has prints configured but I have direct trade pricing available which means cheaper prints if you reach out direct!

Commerical Licencing – If you wish to use my photos for commerical usage please get in touch to obtain a licence.

My Next Project? – In 2025 I am planning my next trip. If you want to learn more about it when it drops follow this blog (rss) and my Instagram

I have added some additional photos to the Honeymoon Through The Lens gallery in the Iceland and Norway Gallery.

Iceland

More Puffins and wildlife! Who doesn’t love Puffins?

Norway

A night photo of a 4x4 and a portrait photo of a glacier and a photo from the MS Iona, one day I was on the promanade deck and I saw a person on the bridge sitting by the Window. I decided to take a photo in the moment and I’m very glad with how it came out!

Honeymoon Through The Lens has drawn to a close. If you would like to see some of my previous art and virtual galleries visit this post to learn more.