La Fabriquilla is one of those places, located close to the southernmost tip of Cabo de Gata. It is mostly known to tourists from elsewhere in Europe as a remote and solitary beach, with perfect sunsets and plenty of room to park your camper van. But the area also contains the remains of what used to be a salt mining operation, sometime during the twentieth century. Located across the main road from the beach, it consists of a few derelict buildings, a nineteenth century church and some scattered fishing skiffs in various stages of decay. It is a place that, at first glance, has no particular attraction. But this impression changes if one arrives late in a windy winter afternoon. As the sun goes down over the Mediterranean it bathes the old buildings and boats in golden light and the place comes alive with colors, shapes, details and shadows. It is a transformation, from a mundane scene to a wonderland of light, that I have witnessed in many other places as well. Suddenly there are so many compositions to work on that the light disappears too quickly. This gallery is but a small sample of what one evening at La Fabriquilla had to offer.

But not all reality, or perception of reality, is equally moving. In my opinion, the light that bathes a landscape is as important as the landscape itself, perhaps even more so. I find the high-angle light of the mid hours of the day, especially in mid-latitude summers, to be outright depressing. I don't mean this just in terms of photographic possibilities (or, rather, lack thereof). I mean psychologically depressing. As far back as my memory can go (many decades...) I can recall a sense of despair coming over me whenever I am outdoors during the few hours that precede and follow noon. It happens to this day. For me, life ends every day two or three hours after dawn and begins again two or three hours before sunset. The remaining daylight hours I prefer to spend indoors, involved in some type of intellectual pursuit if possible, so as to take my mind off the horrors lurking outside. At noon, the most beautiful landscape is meaningless. At sunset, a plain city corner can become the most beautiful place in the world. 

Light gives, and light takes away. But the cycle is endless and predictable - one only needs to wait a few hours, in the certainty that the elation of the early morning will return as dusk approaches and noon becomes only the memory of a bad dream. Let us celebrate light, then. In a sense, all of my photography is a celebration of light above all other elements that make up an image. But why not be more explicit about it? In this spirit, I will be adding galleries to my portfolio that celebrate the light of specific geographic locations. The first two chapters focus on the light of some of North America's magnificent deserts: the Chihuahuan Desert of SW Texas and that part of the Mojave desert that we know as Death Valley. 

It is difficult to photograph the beach at Jökulsárlón without falling into the cliché of stranded ice pebbles. There are those among my photographs, but I have tried to make the ice just one more element among depictions of the open ocean and of the North Atlantic sky. I have attempted to capture the rapidly changing colors and textures of an early winter subarctic sunset. To have the drama in the sky be the central element in my images, with the ice blocks and the basalt pebbles added to give a strong sense of place. You can, hopefully, see this in the photographs of the beach at Jökulsárlón, and also in the images of the lagoon, a few hundred meters inland. Some of these show a sun-star near the horizon. In others, faint clouds that mimic an aurora are a strong element in the composition. And in every case, there are the reflections that are such an important part of this unique place. Reflections of icebergs, mountains and sky on the smooth surface of the lagoon, and also of the colors of the sky on the dark basaltic beach.

A few of the photographs (it is easy to see which ones) come from a previous visit, during a foggy summer day. These images are imbued of a very dark mood, which is exactly how I perceived the place on that, my first trip to Jökulsárlón. The icebergs barely showing in the dark fog made me think of the River Styx and of Charon, its lugubrious ferryman. And do Titan's methane shores resemble, perhaps, Iceland's Atlantic shore on that dark summer day?

I mourn for the solitude that Jökulsárlón will never again see. And I have tried, with my photographs, to rescue the essence of a place as it may have existed in a more genteel and quiet world. 

Their age gives bristlecone pines an internal beauty that few other living beings possess. Whenever I stand next to one I feel engulfed by its age and soothed by its wisdom. How many storms has it witnessed, how many sunrises and sunsets? To think that such a wonderful and innocent being can be killed in an instant by an idiot with a chainsaw, and that this has indeed happened, fills me with the sort of rage and contempt that, regrettably, I all too often feel towards my species. Bristlecones are also physically beautiful, but not in the way that a fir or a palm tree are beautiful. Not two bristlecones are alike. Each has endured its unique share of challenges over its long life and, as a result, each individual has a distinct, twisted, bent and angled shape. After a while, if you visit a grove again and again over the years, you recognize individuals and think of them as old friends, each of them with its own distinct personality. And it is not just the shapes that are unique, the details of the exposed wood, where the bark has died off, are also distinctive. And so are the dead trees, some of which are still standing hundreds of years after the last pine cone dropped to the ground and the last needle turned brown. For bristlecones tend to grow where there is no soil, sinking their roots in glacial till, where humidity is almost non existent. This, together with their very closely-packed wood and the cold dry climate of the high Great Basin ranges, keeps them from rotting. There is a saying in Spanish - los árboles mueren de pie - trees die standing upright. This phrase encapsulates the nobility of trees, all trees, but few other trees are the equals of bristlecones in this.

Bristlecone pine groves have distinctive sounds and smells as well, that in one's mind get forever entangled with the visual experience. It is only the latter that get recorded in photographs, however. Perhaps, if you have been fortunate enough to visit with the bristlecones, these images will bring back many of the sensory experiences of being there. The photographs that accompany this commentary were all taken in a beautiful bristlecone pine grove that grows in a glacial cirque in the high Snake Range of Nevada.

A gallery showcasing blue in all of its wonderful variations seemed to be in order. There is no real unifying idea in this gallery, except for blue. You could call it blue hour, that is fine with me. Most of the photos, except those from Iceland, do fall into the generally accepted definition of photographic blue hour. But that is about it. Most are evenings, one is dawn. Some are deserts, others are coastlines. The images were made in North America, Hawaii, Iceland, New Zealand and Mediterranean Europe. Some of them are technically better than others, some are frankly deficient from a technical point of view. But I like them all. They are blue. And they reflect reality fairly accurately. At least, the reality in my mind as I was making the images. I hope you enjoy the blueness as much as I do! 

The images in this website are only a small fraction of the several hundred images that I captured over a couple of afternoons and evenings next to the lava flow. They were all shot with the same equipment: a manual focus 35-135mm Zeiss zoom and an Olympus EM-1 digital body, plus a tripod when it got too dark. I was concerned that the beautiful glass in my Zeiss lens would devitrify at that temperature, but it survived. Come to think of it, the organic matter that the photographer is made up of would have broken up before the glass. I was also concerned that the camera electronics would be fried, but they also survived. I survived, but became very thirsty, which made the hike back to the car something of a drag. My technique to shoot the pictures was to spend perhaps a minute or two shooting next to the lava, sometimes as close as 1 meter from the lava front, and then walk behind some little knoll that cut the IR from the flow, to cool off, and let my gear cool off, for a few minutes. 

The flow is a classic pahoehoe flow. Much of the activity goes on inside the hardened crust, with the lava flowing along lava tubes. Where the tubes breach the surface of the flow there are lava breakouts that can be quite spectacular. In some case motion is slow enough that the crumpling of the viscous lava is frozen even at relatively low shutter speeds. In other cases the lava moves fast enough to blur the image.  The lava viscosity increases exponentially as it cools down, which explains structures like this or this. In other cases enough lava surges forward that it stays hot long enough to yield a fairly smooth liquid surface. I'm not fond of any language or metaphor that has supernatural connotations, but I must say that some of the images do look like the Gates of Hell.

Those times are, I want to believe, behind me. I am still strongly attracted to shooting wide-angle panoramic landscapes, but I have discovered, very belatedly, the photographic possibilities of many other natural environments. Among these are deep canyons with sheer rock walls and austere dryland vegetation. The American West is richly endowed in these environments, perhaps as no other place in the world. The Colorado Plateau is in a very real sense defined by them, but there are also some magnificent examples in the Great Basin, in the Mojave Desert, in the Chihuahuan desert, in the Rockies and even in the drier regions of the Pacific Northwest. 

Once you begin hiking canyons the photographic possibilities dawn on you. The play of light and shadows on canyon walls changes constantly as the day goes by. In contrast to photographing "in the open", when one is essentially constrained to short periods of good light in the early morning and late afternoon or evening, the light at the bottom of a canyon can be good at any time of the day. And if it is not, just keep walking, it may be good around the next bend. In some narrow canyons there may not be direct sunlight at the bottom even at noon, but the colors and textures of the walls are always there. Of course, I am not saying anything that has not been said many times before. I have not discovered anything new. It simply took me a very long time to find out by myself.

And the possibilities really multiply, the more you hike in canyons and come to enjoy them. You can concentrate only on the repertoire of shadows of varying intensities, perhaps with blotches of sunlight. Or you can work with the vegetation. Or with rocks strewn on the floor. Or focus on the maze-like geometry of many canyons. Or simply enjoy feeling small next to a massive wall carved by a stream that may only carry water once or twice a year.

So I have now been hiking canyons for some time. Given the choice, I still prefer my highland walks. But there is a very important place in my photography for the play of light on canyon walls. I know that there will be more to come.

When asked whether there is anything about Georgia that I like, my answer is always the same: Atlanta's airport, specifically the check-in counters (baggage claim not so much). Most of my photography starts at ATL-Hartsfield. On average, I manage to be gone for a total of some two months every year. The other ten months I am Georgia, and I try to make the best I can of it. For lack of a better place, I usually end up walking the trails at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, and sometimes even talk myself into thinking that it is sort of OK. It is a good place to test and compare photo gear, for no better reason than the fact that I have photographed many times the same places, over the seasons and under a wide variety of lighting conditions. But those are technical matters, that you can read about in my other blog, if you are interested. 

One way, certainly not a new idea, to try to comprehend the place where I live is to follow some of the same places as they change along the year. I don't intend this to be a "surgical" review, however, showing exactly the same places at precisely spaced time intervals over the course of a year. What I will attempt to do is to use images that convey some understanding of what the Georgia Piedmont looks and feels. It may be that different times of the year are best captured in different places. I invite you to visit the autumn of Georgia at the State Botanical Garden and Sandy Creek Park, both located in Athens, short drives away from where I live.

Of course, I have known about the Icelandic Sagas since childhood, but I had not read them. During my first visit, after spending about a month driving around the country and meeting Icelanders, I became deeply aware that this powerful and difficult land had bred a most welcoming, warm and friendly people. Are these the descendants of the fearsome Vikings? What better way of understanding my newly found friends than by reading what they had to say about their origins? How I wish that I had discovered them much earlier. The sagas are as unique as Iceland and the Icelanders. If I had read them thirty or forty years ago, and I had visited the country back then, perhaps my outlook on humanity would be more positive than it is. Better late than never, I suppose. Much has been written about why the sagas are masterpieces, about their unique place in prose narrative, centuries before anything remotely comparable arose in mainland Europe. I can certainly see this, but, to me, what is truly great about the sagas is how they succeed in changing one's perception of an entire people and their culture. For we grow up learning to fear the Vikings as the scourge of the Dark Ages. And yet, in the sagas, where they talk about themselves, we see them every bit as human as any of us. Some of them - Olaf and his father Hoskuld in The Saga of the People of Laxardal - are eminently decent human beings. Gisli Sursson is deeply unlucky through no fault of his own. Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir may be one of the most remarkable pre-modern women. And then there is that most complex and likable of anti-heroes, Egill Skallagrimsson. If they are any different from King Alfred, the Cid or Roland it is in their more patent humanity. 

Iceland has become popular with the Lonely Planet crowd and with the selfie generation. Shame - they tend to ruin what they touch, although they may have a harder time with Iceland. You will see them congregating in the (justly) famous waterfalls, glaciers and volcanoes. I prefer to begin my photographic exploration of Iceland along the coast, and in particular with some of its pretty harbors. Where the endless summer twilight, the fog and the quiet fjords give a softer, and perhaps more accurate, image of the land and its people.

When Great Basin National Park was established in the mid 1980's it was apparently possible to preserve only a small portion of the higher elevations of the Snake Range, in Eastern Nevada. It would have been better to include much of the lower elevation surrounding valleys as well, but there are humans who claim property rights over those areas. I am not opposed to private property, but I do think that it is a right that should be subordinate to the the needs of nature preservation, and that in a situation such as this one the ranchers occupying the valleys around the Snake Range should have been kicked out, so as to make a National Park that preserves the full spectrum of landscapes and life zones that the Great Basin is capable of. But that is not going to happen and, in any case, here I am again, fuming rather than celebrating. So let's celebrate. 

There are times when you can feel that you have Great Basin National Park all to yourself. Autumn is one of those times. The colors are everywhere, and the landscape changes almost from hour to hour, as the clouds, the rain and the sleet move in and out. It is a time when peaceful sunsets and stormy ones alternate with no obvious plan. When you can follow the aspen leaves as they cover the banks of Baker Creek or as they collect sleet along the trails, that melts to form millions of miniature magnifying glasses. If you have never been to Great Basin National Park, or if you have visited only during the summer when nature is less interesting and the human presence is an ever present stain, you are missing on a well-kept secret. Go, visit, enjoy, but don't tell other people.....  

I left Buenos Aires about three decades ago and have lived in smallish University towns ever since - Eugene, Oregon and Athens, Georgia. I would never be able to re-adapt to being a permanent dweller of one of the world's large cities. I do miss quite a few things, especially the chance of being able to get out of the house and spend an evening walking streets that I may have walked many times before, recognizing trees and front doors and gardens and sidewalk potholes. Somehow this never worked in Athens nor in Eugene. You need a large city, with a seemingly infinite collection of streets. A city that, without much effort, one may think of as a dystopian creation of J.G. Ballard. Otherwise you (or at least I) soon get bored. 

I don't live in Georgia because I like it (I do not), but because I have to (the perils of academic careers, which are even worse for two-career couples). I try to flee the Southeastern US as often as I can but, when planning a trip, large cities are seldom, if ever, at the center of my itineraries. If I can choose, I choose places with few people, which means jumping on a plane and traveling cross-country or over the ocean to go walking in the deserts and mountains and remote coastlines of the Western US, Hawaii, Iceland and Spain. Every now and then, however, the opportunity arises of spending some time in one of the world's large cities. On the way back from our trip to Iceland in November of 2014 (more on that elsewhere) an overnight layover in New York was unavoidable. If we are going to stay overnight, why not make it a couple of days?

New York is a city that brings up strong feelings in me, perhaps because it reminds me of the city that I grew up in in so many ways, good and bad. They are both cities that swelled with the immigrants who arrived in overcrowded steamships at the turn of the twentieth century. The buildings from that time are still plentiful in Buenos Aires and New York. Italian and Jewish DNA are everywhere in the two cities. Both have distinctive accents and slangs, they share their paranoia, moodiness and humor. 

New York is of course the more spectacular of the two - it is the Capital of the World, no doubt. And this fact makes Central Park all the more special. It is the city's courtyard and garden, a small patch of relative quiet and lack of asphalt, where one can pretend to be inside a bubble, looking out onto a world in another solar system.  We spent a warm November evening, just before Thanksgiving of 2014, strolling around Central Park. These are my impressions of that peaceful day.

As always, I began writing this blog entry with a topic in mind, and I have yet to start on that topic. I wanted to give some context to one of my galleries. If given the choice of migrating to an ocean planet (say, Frank Herbert's Caladan) or a desert planet (his Arrakis), I would not hesitate to choose the latter. But the ocean holds and indisputable attraction, which is quite possibly shared by all humans. I do not like the sea of midday, I do not care for an ocean under a bright cloudless sky. But a cover of turbulent clouds can transform an otherwise dull seascape into a scene that evokes places that may exist only in our imagination, yet are very real, extending away from us and into a distance that we cannot comprehend. I sit here watching one such scene on the North Shore of Maui. The horizon is a blurry blend of cloud and sea, of a luminosity that can only exist in tropical latitudes. It is not the forbidding horizon of subarctic latitudes, all too common along Iceland's spectacularly varied coastline. It is not the endless horizon of the Pacific Northwest coast. Nor the always luminous Mediterranean horizon that I have to come to know and love in the volcanic coastline of Almería, in the southeast of Spain. It is a horizon that I will be trying to document over the coming weeks. If I succeed (and I may not, as I prefer to set too difficult standards), then a new gallery will display some of my efforts. For now, I invite you to look at other portraits of The Clouds and the Sea. As always, I thank your for your visit and invite you to start a conversation.

We all have different and unique ways of relating to our surroundings, and in particular to the natural world. For example, although I can understand the beauty and the biological significance of tropical forests, I am strongly repelled by them, in an almost atavistic fashion.  Something very old inside me sees them as places of terror, death and decay. I don't remember when I began feeling this way, but I do remember that, when I was a freshly minted geologist and I was in one of my first jobs as a minerals exploration geologist in the Paraguayan forest, I already felt this way. It was a strong rejection of, and revulsion at, my surroundings. I had not spent much, if any, time in rain forests before then, so it may be that I was born with this ancestral fear. More likely, the loathing of tropical forests grew out of something that I read or saw in the movies as a child, and that is otherwise deeply buried in my neural circuits (for that is all that conscience at its different levels is). Interestingly, I do not have this same feeling towards temperate and boreal forest and woods, in fact I like them. So it is not the trees, nor the darkness, nor the limited horizon. It is not the possibility of having unexpected encounters with fauna of varying sizes either. It is something that is barely defined, that has to do with constant growth and decay, and with corrupt humanity (in all the possible meanings of the word). Perhaps Joseph Conrad felt the same way, and was able to translate his feelings into that masterpiece, Heart of Darkness. In another masterpiece, the film Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O'Toole (T.E. Lawrence) is asked why he loves the desert so much. His answer could have been mine: "Because the desert is clean". Clean as in honest, pure, naive, pristine, permanent. Tropical forests are, for me, the most unclean environments on Earth. Of course, they are essential cogs in the planet's machinery. They must be protected from destruction and human encroachment (is there any difference?), for the sake of all of the non-human beings that  live in them. But I don't want to go there.

I began this blog entry talking about deserts, and so far have used almost as much space talking about tropical forests. Perhaps I got sidetracked, but it is just as likely that I was trying to describe all that is beautiful about deserts by describing what I see as their antithesis. No matter. In my photography you will find many desert images, especially of North American deserts. This website will always be a work in progress, and only a few galleries are online as I write this. Among them is one devoted to the many moods that sunrise can take in Death Valley. I invite you to visit this gallery and spend a few instants with each image. Perhaps you know these places, and my photos will bring back the sounds and the smells of the Sun slowly rising over the Mesquite dunes, near Stovepipe Wells, or over the Zabriskie badlands, or behind Dante's View on a very cold December morning. If you have never been there, then it is my hope that through these images you may understand why the desert is such an important place for some of us. Perhaps one day we will meet out there?