Unless I’m experiencing a total brain fade, I’m caught up with all the participant Same Place — Different View comparisons. They are fun to do, and from the comments we get, the participants get a kick out of them and seeing once again the work of their fellow students.
I thought I’d return to some images Arnie and I have made over the past year and do some more Same Place — Different View blogs with a few of our photographs in each one.
Spain is a visual feast. It offers so much, from Barcelona and the northeast coast … to the lush Pyrenees … to the plains (The rain in Spain …) and beyond.
And let’s not forget the serrated mountains and white hill towns, pueblos blancos, of Andalucia in the southern part of the country where we’re headed in June.
I first visited this area with my mother back in 1987. Not much has changed since then. Sure, some of the towns have spilled down the hillsides a little more; and yes, some of the larger towns have sprawled a bit, but essentially, this part of the world is as charming as it was almost 25 years ago.
For our first workshop in Spain, Arnie felt more comfortable going to a place he knew, Barcelona, and we had a wonderful time there in the land of Dali and cava. But I had always wanted to return to Andalucia, or Andalusia, as we Yanks spell it. I showed Arnie the photographs from ’87, and he was intrigued. One of the images that had caught his eye was the one above that I did really early one morning when the fog was still blanketing the hills.
“Where is that,” he’d keep on asking, the memory of it imprinted on his brain.
“Ronda.”
“Take me there,” he insisted more than once.
And so, I showed him where it was, but the light during our scouting at this location was harsh in the midday sun. When we’re scouting for workshop locations, we are checking out a lot of sites in a short period of time. We don’t have the luxury of picking the ideal time, as the goal is to cover as much ground as possible. That said, we’ve been doing this for many years, both in our commercial work and for our workshops, and experience, observation, and the occasional use of a compass let us know when the light is going to be magical. Indeed, it was one evening when we brought the group back to photograph the lights on the “New Bridge” over El Tajo, that amazing, steep gorge the divides the ancient city of Ronda in half.
While our participants were finding more-or-less-safe perches on the gorge rim and photographing, using their tripods to steady themselves as much as their cameras, Arnie and I looked the other way. Any photographer knows it’s easy to get engrossed in a subject and forget to look around or behind, but the scene behind us down in and across the valley was just as dramatic as the shot up towards the bridge.
Arnie did this image looking across at those same, silhouetted trees on the ridge that I had photographed in ’87, waiting until the lights came on along a steep, hillside road.
I did my composition a tad earlier, as I wanted a little, subtle detail in the trees on the hillside. I also liked the post-sunset patterns in the sky. “Red skies at night, shepherds’ delight…” (I grew up with the sailor’s version.) Here, in the land of sheep, it couldn’t have been more perfectly suited, and the next day was gorgeous.
But we weren’t concerned with tomorrow’s weather. We loved what was presented to us that evening.
This is one of the examples of Arnie and I flipping. Traditionally, Arnie does the wide-angle shot, while I tend to home in on a subject. As you can see, this was not the case. I loved the broad view, while Arnie was attracted to a portion of the tree line and the lights leading up to it.
Same place … exactly. Same view … yes. But, in all three cases, a different vision, effect, and treatment.
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