Iceland was a lesson in persistence. The conditions made sure of that.

Long days. Long drives from Reykjavik to Vestrahorn, taking in Fjallsárlón, Jökulsárlón, Reynisfjara, Seljalandsfoss, Skógafoss and Vikurfjara. Wind that hardly stopped. Rain by the bucket load. Up for breakfast, out battling the elements, back for dinner, rinse and repeat.

My lesson in persistence began in earnest on the first hour of my first photo shoot at Vestrahorn. My tripod was caught by the wind and my OM-1 smashed. Now I didn’t have the camera I needed for this trip of a lifetime.

What surprised me was what happened next.

I spent the rest of that morning shooting with my iPhone, and I felt much freer when I was using it. I could play with different views rather than obsess over a single composition.

More importantly, it kept me moving. Shooting handheld made persistence feel liberating rather than exhausting.

Later, I returned to my hotel to get my backup OM-5 camera, but I decided I had earned the right to continue to shoot handheld to manage the brutal Iceland weather.

And what weather! The wind battered the hotel at night, loud enough to wake me, and there were days when just standing upright took effort. At one point, shooting at Skógafoss, the wind battered my clothing so hard that my smart watch told me I'd had a serious fall. It was about to call the emergency number for help.

There were mornings when I sat in the vehicle, watching rain lash down, thinking it might never pass. Going out anyway, persisting even when I didn’t want to, became part of the experience.

Some places took repeated visits. Persistence paid off at Diamond Beach, not because conditions suddenly became perfect, but because I stayed long enough to understand the landscape, the rhythm of the waves.

Other locations didn't always work. Some were too complex. Some were too simple, with little beyond the obvious composition.

As the days went on, I learnt that movement, not waiting, was my way of dealing with the conditions.

Waiting is often fetishised in landscape photography. Waiting for the light. Waiting for the decisive moment. But to achieve a state of flow, I need to walk and explore. Movement engages me. That isn’t impatience; it’s how I work.

That way of working changed what I noticed. For example, this glacier at Fjallsjökull is undergoing catastrophic retreat due to climate change. I used a long lens to get this shot and if you look closely I think you can see a version of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ buried in the glacier, hence my title.

On the flight home, I worried if I had enough images for a book. But persistence paid off. These photographs exist because I didn’t retreat when conditions were wrong or when the experience became uncomfortable.

I learned that if I keep taking photographs every day, whatever the weather, those days turn into something.

There's a more prosaic argument for getting out in bad weather: sometimes you have just one chance to get the shot. The conditions right now may be far from perfect. You might persuade yourself to come back later. But later isn't necessarily better; this may be as good as it gets.

As an example, I took this picture of Reyniskirkja Church with my iPhone early in the trip when I stopped for lunch. This is better than the picture I took with my OM-5 at the end of the trip when the wind made handholding nearly impossible. Because I knew I would be revisiting, I didn't get my camera bag out the first time I was here. That was a mistake. (And of course my preferred camera was broken when I returned). Carpe diem!

Persistence isn’t about heroic effort or waiting for the landscape to cooperate. It’s about staying present, adapting how you work, and accepting that the difficult conditions you’re experiencing right now may never get any better. These images, and those in my new book, Iceland, are the result of that acceptance.