Patagonia

I was planning to share some photos from a trip to Patagonia some two plus years ago when work interrupted me. Now health interrupted my work! (I’m fine, just recovering from a surgery and on medical leave for a while).

Regardless, I realized that every time I show these pictures, people don’t see them as “real”. They need some context and explanation because without that most of them appear unreal, and they deserve a narrative to accompany them and hopefully bring them to life. I care about this because we’re fortunate to visit great places like this and at a minimum feel others deserve to live vicariously through us when we we do.

So here goes…

This was our first morning after hiking from El Chalten to a camp nearby we got up before dawn to catch the sunrise on Mount Fitz Roy. The sun literally painted the mountain in front of us with this orange pink light. It was breathtaking. It was hard to know which moment of the sunrise to capture and really a video would probably have helped to share the magic of the moment unfolding. My brother does a great job of being the videographer in the family and you can see how well he captured it [here].

For the photographers among you, I chose a  marginally slow shutter speed (1/13th sec) to allow the cascading water to offer motion, but still have texture to match the rocks.

Within a matter of minutes after sunrise, the clouds had gathered and the light went cool, leaving a very different scene. I chose a much longer shutter speed to create a milky soft feeling in the water.

Before we go much further let me share my belief in life that it’s all “People first“. And this group was no exception, led by Marco and Jessica who were just fantastic hosts, we had a great group, shown here below. Marco is in the cool italian orange pants and Jessica is, well, the only girl. But actually for a bunch of otherwise older white guys we were pretty diverse in our backgrounds and enjoyed learning from each other. The only exception was someone who will remain nameless who snored louder than a MAC truck who had to relocate himself outside our camping zone!s

— NOTES and WIP only below here —

Light and texture were such made for such interesting interplay. Here I used a very small aperture both to get the starburst of the sun but also to highlight the tree shapes not color and then catch the light on the shadow of the moss on the tree stump.