Europe in Photographs

I knew I had an image hoarding problem after I surpassed the 200,000 mark. I needed to do something about it. About a month ago, I switched to a program called Lightroom from Adobe. The version of the software I’m using resides in the cloud as do all my photos from now on. I might still take a few hundred shots while I’m out, but now I’m forced to go through all of them right away and pick my favorites. Everything else goes in the digital trash and my choices are then uploaded to the cloud. This has made media management a heck of a lot easier and it has allowed me to really get a sense of what I have that’s worthwhile in my collection.

I’m going through all of my older photographs and it’s a huge amount of work. Given the near global lockdown, it’s the perfect time to start chipping away at this boulder of a project. My first task was to go through all of my recent photos from Europe so I decided that I would put together another blog post highlighting some my favorite images from the past year. Readers of this blog seemed to appreciate the behind-the-scenes captions I did on my Morocco post so I’ll do the same here. I hope you enjoy them.

The Camino de Santiago was… well, it’s actually hard to find the words to describe it. Life-changing, maybe? It slowed everything down. It let me see life going by at a walking pace. As travelers, we are mostly on the move in our motorhome so things tend to speed by the window and sometimes I don’t see them at all. The Camino changed that. If there was a church on the horizon, for instance, it could take us an hour or two to get to it. Slowing everything down meant breathing more deeply and just being in the the moment. One day, while I was walking behind Linda, I wanted to try to make a photograph that embodied the idea of the Camino. I think this one conveys it nicely. The road stretches off into the infinite distance. There are no landmarks on the horizon, only more walking, more thinking, more “being”. Our only goal at the beginning of each day was to go from A to B at our own pace and we achieved that by putting one foot in front of the other.

I’ll let you in on a secret. I’m a recovering catholic. Religion doesn’t feature heavily in my life but spirituality does and I feel it most when I am out in a remote place. The Camino afforded many opportunities like that. Out of breath after walking up a fairly steep hill, I came across this statue of, I assume, Mary. It had a power that I wasn’t expecting. The mountains behind were lit up in such a way that they looked like layers of ribbons. She stood there in silence. A sense of calm came over me for a few moments and I told myself I wasn’t going to worry about my camera and just be in the moment. But the photographer in me was compelled to capture it and I’m glad I did. I actually added a textured layer over the photo. I don’t know why but maybe it was because the original was missing something. Sometimes I have to process a photo to the point where it most resembles not only what I saw but what I was feeling at the time.

This image makes me smile. Linda was forging ahead one early morning and this mural on the wall grabbed my attention. It looks like she is being followed by the figures on the wall. If I recall, the original scene was pretty colorful but I chose black and white to simplify the composition so the emphasis was more on the shapes of the figures rather than the vibrant colors.

I’ve always been attracted to fog as a photographer and filmmaker. Aside from the obvious air of mystery it adds to a scene, I’m most fascinated with the way it simplifies objects. Had I shot this on a clear sunny day, it would have been a very busy composition. The field on the right would be chockablock with detail and the contrast of the light and shadow would be pretty strong. Fog makes things appear and disappear. The man is standing out in stark contrast to the rest of the composition and the field is just roughly sketched to suggest its depth. Black and white always lends itself to simple compositions and it enhances the sense of solitude in this particular image. I think it also expresses another side of the Camino experience. Although it can be quite social, there are many times when you are just alone with your thoughts.

When we walked the Camino, it ended at Santiago de Compostela in Spain. There was an optional ending point that went all the way to the ocean but we decided that our trek across northern Spain from Saint Jean Pied de Port in France was going to be enough for us. Later in the year we decided to return to Santiago and walk to Muxía on the coast. It was another 80kms or so. I had watched the movie “The Way” with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez several times and their characters had made it all the way to Muxía and the end of the movie showed them at the church there. I always loved that scene and wanted to photograph the church for myself. The scene in the movie was shot on an overcast day but the church and the ocean had a lot of drama. I was hoping for some clouds when we arrived. Again, black and white was an obvious choice because the brickwork in the church had a perfect texture to it. I didn’t want it to look too modern either so that timelessness I love so much really emanated in monochrome. Also having a solitary person there was good for both scale and interest. I’ve said it before but once you insert a human into a photograph, it changes things dramatically.

Another favorite memory of mine from last year is Col du Lautaret in France. There was a heatwave spreading across Europe so we wanted to get up into the mountains to cooler temperatures. We went on a hiking trail to a nearby glacier and the views were fantastic. One thing I’ve learned over the years while making photographs is that conveying scale, even with a person in the picture, can be a challenge. In a situation like this, I chose to zoom my lens in all the way. Had I chosen a wide angle lens, the mountains would not look as grand. Why is this? A wide angle will always make things smaller and will exaggerate distance. You’ve probably noticed that even shooting on your phone. When you zoom in, it compresses the distance between the near subject and the background. Essentially what the lens did in this case was brought the glacier closer to Linda. The photograph now more accurately represents the grand scale of the surroundings.

It’s just such a treat finding a wild camping spot in the mountains. Still in Col du Lautaret, I was looking out our window and noticed the speckled light making for some great drama. I grabbed my camera and ran out the door and up a hill. I looked through the viewfinder trying to find the perfect composition when this dog ran into the frame. It changed the whole tone of what I was trying to capture. I love how dynamic her silhouette is and how tiny she is next to the mountain. I also caught her as she passed a little spotlight of sun. This was a lucky shot. I believe that if I put myself in the line of fire, so to speak, luck will come. For that reason, I always have my camera close by.

Another day at Col du Lautaret some trucks arrived and hundreds of sheep spilled out and invaded the nearby hills. This was quite a spectacle as you can imagine. The original color image was nice but, because of the harsh light, the sheep were almost blending into the grass. I converted it to black and white and was able to take the green slider (representing the grass) and turn up the brightness. Doing that made the sheep stand out in stark contrast and also made the hill itself more dominant in the composition. Many photographers say you can’t get good images when the sun is high in the sky but there are always creative ways of proving them wrong 🙂

I’m proud of this image mainly because I was feeling kind of lazy but I went out in the fog and rain to get it anyway. We rolled into a little harbor car park in Arcade, France and it was pretty dreary out. I had to take an umbrella but I knew what I wanted. The fog, as usual, had decluttered the scene and the reflection of the boats in the water looked like a painting to me. I awkwardly held my camera and umbrella together and got this shot. Now I will admit that it looked fairly pedestrian when I looked at it on the computer. In order for it to look like the painting I had in my head, I manipulated the colors and added a couple of textured layers and blended the whole thing to my liking. It’s really important for me as a photographer to get the idea I have in my head into the final image. Sometimes this means complex processing, other times it’s just straight out of the camera.

As classic an image as this is of Irish countryside, it’s actually hard to capture. Usually the fields are in full sun and look pretty flat in photographs or the opposite is true, cloudy skies conveying an equally flat landscape. My favorite type of light is when the sun is poking out randomly from a cloudy sky. It selectively spotlights different parts of the scenery. With different layers of light, a sense of depth and mood appears and that’s what makes this image special for me.

This is Skellig Michael, a remote island on the southwest coast of Ireland. It has been used as a shooting location for Star Wars. We didn’t make it out there but it almost looks to me like an iceberg floating out in the ocean. I love the color of the water and the hazy island. Haze implies distance and one of the biggest challenges I have in photography is showing a three dimensional scene in a two-dimensional photograph. Atmosphere and light can hint at that sense of depth.

We traveled to Achill Island on the west coast of Ireland to visit the ruins of an old settlement called Slievemore Village. There’s not much to it at this point aside from walls where stone houses once stood. The weather was dramatic on this day and because of the extreme light in the background I had to shoot 5 different images at different exposures and then blend them together to make this work. I think this image shows the passing of time and the desolation of this place.

This was shot in a remote part of Donegal in Ireland called Malin Head. It could have been shot a hundred years ago and that’s what I had in mind when I saw it from the hilltop where I stood. There are few thatched cottages left in Ireland and that was a bit of a disappointment for me. I imagined they would be all over the west coast as they were when I was a kid.

This is such a quintessential Irish pub facade. When I saw it in the little town of Dingle I had to capture it. It is also a reminder of a damn fine pint of Guinness I had while in there one afternoon.

It was very sobering to say the least when we visited Oradour-dur-Glane in France. These are the remains of a village that was massacred by the Nazis in 1944. 642 people, almost the entire population, were killed in a single day. It’s not a place to take selfies. In fact, it was so emotional to be there that I came away with less images than I normally would. This road, in particular, with these buildings had a ghostly presence. I wanted the photograph to have a sense of abandonment and loneliness. I achieved this with black and white and blended in some textured layers to make it look like an old distressed print.

At a glance, this altar looks pretty with the way the light is falling but, upon closer inspection, you can see the wall has disintegrated as a result of a huge fire where many died.

More artifacts from Oradour-sur-Glane. I find decay to be a fascinating subject to shoot. Earth reclaims everything. I was struck by the image of this clock quite literally being consumed by time itself.

Mont Saint-Michel is as magnificent in real life as it looks in photographs. Probably more so. What I discovered from looking at my photographs is that it’s on a bit of a tilted hill and, as a result, the horizon is not completely straight. It looks weird if I don’t correct for the horizon but the steeple looks slightly off if I do. What a dilemma! I opted for the latter. Despite how impressive the architecture and scale of this place is, my favorite part of this image is the 3 people to the right 🙂

On my way to get an evening shot of Mont Saint-Michel, the setting sun burst through the clouds. The angle of the trees is really interesting to me and dictated this composition. It’s almost like the light is causing them to lean back. I was tempted to remove that little bird above the trees but I kinda like it.

I shot this in Lisbon, Portugal one night. It was raining and, instead of just a static shot of the tram, I wanted to capture its movement. Photography is all about freezing a moment but sometimes it can capture a sense of time through movement and a slow shutter speed.

Finally, this is one I just shot a few days ago. We were in Capbreton in France right by the beach. I wasn’t expecting surfers but there they were. What I love about this shot is its symmetry. Each surfer is a mirror of the other, arms and all. Even the surf from their boards matches.

I’ve always said to Linda if we were to stop traveling tomorrow, the best years of my life would be the ones I spent in both Scoopy and Bijou. Well it turns out we have stopped traveling today because of the coronavirus and I still feel the same way. I’ll continue to wade through my photos of our adventures and be reminded yet again of why we are so fortunate to live the way we do.

Next Up: Who knows?

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