Halli received his first Canon as a birthday gift from his wife Anna – a slightly devious way to lure him out of the house. He switched to a Sony shortly after, thinking it was the camera that was holding him back. He was wrong.
Halli gets his training on YouTube and is trying to resist tasteless, over-the-top editing, an inclination that will likely last a lifetime without abatement. Halli has countless lenses, filters, drones and tripods. It is fair to say that he has all the paraphernalia of a professional landscape photographer – but only a smidgeon of their talent . Nevertheless he started his very own YouTube channel and got all the way to one video. Not exactly a channel.
Halli was handed his first paycheck at age nine, which was not uncommon in Iceland in the ’70s. He is a firm believer that most people create their own luck and should have the freedom to do so. His previous jobs – which are numerous – include a gofer and computer programmer.
He is a serial-entrepreneur. Together with his wife Anna, he founded one of the first fitness centers in Iceland, the first self-storage facility in Iceland and cofounded the first fully automated self-storage facilities in Italy. Halli is the creator of a software which serves as the backbone of self-storage facilities around the world. Halli was the cofounder of the Icelandic Marketing Association and first chairman of their annual awards ceremony. He graduated from the University of Iceland and later earned his MBA in San Diego.
Halli has skied, played basketball and soccer, all without any notable distinctions. He joined the Reykjavik Golf Club in 1979 and for years battled a high slice. He had a brief stint as the Vice-Chair of the Icelandic Golf Association but got bored quickly in meetings and quit (to this day, he remains averse to meetings). Having joined the PGA golf club in Port Saint Lucie in Florida in 2011, Halli kept his record as an unremarkable athlete. Thanks, however, to his partners, his proudest moments came when he shot a gross 54 in a four-person scramble and later became the Member-Member Champion alongside his Italian friend Renato Minnei.
Halli owns a tenor saxophone and a guitar. Upon request from friends and family members, he does NOT sing or perform in public (a somewhat tragic truth for someone who attends every rock, blues and jazz concert that comes around). He is known to embarrass his children with ungainly dance moves and often relates long-winded stories at the dinner table – stories that in his opinion are too good to tell only once.
Halli and Anna are proud parents of three and have three grandchildren. Their passion is photography and travel and have visited 100 countries. Some of their favorite places outside Iceland are the Galapagos, Salar de Uni, Patagonia, Machu Picchu, Halong Bay, Kauai, Masai Mara, Yosemite, the Pacific Coastline, Amalfi and Greenland.. They plan on spending much of their time in their RV photographing the beauty of Iceland (the RV is seen here from a trip under the stars in Joshua Tree National Park). Anna and Halli consider themselves extremely lucky to be born and raised in Iceland. They hope to reveal the beauty of many of the lesser-photographed places of Iceland to their fellow earthlings.
