text: Landscape and Entrepreneurship in Iceland | Poppy Barley
  I packed up my camera gear and my rain suit and headed off to The Land of Fire and Ice. It was primarily a work trip… but the work involved touring around Iceland, meeting a bunch of amazing people and getting access to places that you wouldn't normally get to see.
  In one word, Iceland is amazing. We spent most of our time in Reykjavík, a small city of just 120,000 overwhelmingly good looking people. If you're looking for fun in the sun, then Iceland isn't the place for you. It's gloomy and the temperature hovers at around 10-15 degrees celsius for most of the year, but what it lacks in sunshine it makes up for in quirkiness and insane landscape.
  My favourite part of the trip was the 16 hours we spent touring Southern Iceland with our tour guide Sigurður (Siggy). One of the stories we filmed was on the startup company Guide To Iceland, and so they organized a private guided tour for us (again, it was amazing). Siggy was the perfect guide; he understood that we were there to get some crazy drone footage, so he took us to some of the lesser known, off-the-beaten-path locations. The landscape in Iceland is diverse. In the span of a few hours you can see terrain that feels like Mars and then an hour away be in Middle Earth.
  In 2008 the Icelandic economy suffered the same banking crash that the U.S did. The difference is that in Iceland, the government didn't bail out the banks. The result was that the economy crumbled and a lot of people had to regroup and start over. This shift caused a few interesting side effects. 1. The tourism industry took a front seat, and a large portion of the people of Iceland make their living in tourism. 2. The financial crash left a number of highly educated people without jobs, who in turn took their knowledge and passion and created new startup companies. I leave you with just a few of them:
  I highly recommend visiting Iceland. The landscape is unreal, the people are great and with great deals available through Iceland Air from most major cities it's never been easier to visit.
  Here is a short video with some highlights from the trip.
  Developer, Poppy Barley
  Although his technical job title at Poppy Barley is "developer", he's also our in-house photographer, videographer, comedian, musician-DJ extraordinaire (he really was a '90s DJ), and video-game maker. Whether he's taking product shots of our boots and flats, pulling together amazing videos in just one day, or speaking "code", he makes our website/design/navigation ideas a reality. In his spare time, he's working on a live music video series, the Northern Sessions.