Water, Water, Tunch

The day started with another visit to the canyon viewpoint, to see if we could get better light than on Wednesday. At first it looked like the Eastern sky was overcast and we wouldn’t get much, but suddenly about 1/2 before dawn it brightened up and gave us another show, but with a bit more cloud than yesterday.

It’s very interesting how photographs reflect a photographer’s outlook, and how different photographers seek different key characteristics for that purpose. I loved the cloudless sky yesterday morning and the strong geographic shapes in red and orange or blue which resulted from it. My companion for the same shoot didn’t and was much more enthusiastic about the small clouds on the mountains, which I regarded as “messing up” the underlying shapes. Chacun à son goût.

After breakfast we got on the bus and drove for well over an hour through the park to the Cascada Cañadon de los Toros, a small but dramatic cascade near the end of the navigable road. This was ideal for my style of shooting, lots of different views from tricky positions well-suited to hand-holding. However I discovered that I had to do slightly more hand-holding than recommended – the best lens for the job was my new 9mm f/1.7, but it takes 55mm filters and I only have a 58mm neutral density filter (to slow down the shutter speed and hence the water’s movement). The best shots therefore were taken at around 1/10s with my right hand holding the camera, and my left holding the ND filter. Thank the forces of light, or whoever’s responsible, for dual image stabilisation!

It was another long drive back, so we headed off for “lunch” at about 3pm. It amuses me that while we have a well-established term for late breakfast / early lunch, we have no equivalent term for “we missed lunch so let’s eat enough now to cover it and tea/dinner”. My vote is for “Tunch”. We had a very nice tunch of steak and beer.

At the end of the day we had a short hike up to the Mirador los Condores. The light wasn’t great, but we did get some nice views of the town, and one very dramatic lenticular cloud above one of the peaks.

Tomorrow, we move on to Chile.