Garras

Last Sunday after work I made a short walk with a friend to an old burned tree. A few years ago a careless tourist threw a cigarette butt at it and it caught fire. Luckily the damage was relatively small because the tree is only a few minutes from the town and the firefighters were able to put it out before it spread around the place. Still, it is a remainder of how fragile nature is.

Now the tree is still there, bleached white by the fire and the weather, and since it has no leaves it offers some very nice shapes in the night.

I had already made a few pictures there a year ago, but at the time some clouds appeared and I didn’t have a wide enough lens to do what I wanted. This time the weather was perfect, and with my new 11-16 mm f2.8 I was able to archive something much more interesting.

I decided to do a stack of several exposures (55 single shots) each 30 sec long at f2.8 and ISO 1600 to captures as many stars as possible. The long exposure time (27 minutes total) made some nice star trails and I decided to point the camera straight up to avoid capturing the ground.

Here is the result!

El Chalten, Patagonia Argentina

(55 imagenes, total 27 minutos)

I would have liked to have some more light for the tree but the moon wasn’t up yet. They ended looking like a silhouette, but it’s not too bad.

I went out again yesterday night with the idea of going to Laguna Torre and shooting Cerro Torre in a really long exposure (2 hs +) with a tele lens to get straight lines in the stars, but halfway there I realized I had forgotten my remote release and had to go back. Maybe next time!

Cheers!
Santiago

Crack

You probably heard and old saying that goes something like “No plan survives contact with the enemy”. Simple and pretty accurate, but it sounds as if it applies only to the army.

To make it more general, we could say that “No theory survives contact with reality”, or maybe I was a little to optimistic!

My last post was almost two months ago, when I had just arrived to El Chalten. Since then a lot of things have passed, some were bad but luckily most where pretty good. However, some didn’t allow me to go out as much as I wanted and as a result I had few pictures to post.

Now I am having more time, and it has allowed me to go out more frequently, and even go camping once a week (on my free day).

Hopefully I will keep having enough time (and energy!) to go out. The weather now is pretty nice. Not too cold and not too hot, though it is still as windy as ever.

To the pictures then. The first is from Laguna de los Tres (the same place from my last post).

Crack (Cerro Fitz Roy y Cerro Poincenot)

Laguna de los Tres, El Chalten, Patagonia Argentina

It was taken during sunrise a few weeks ago. To get there at sunrise, I slept in camp Poincenot, and then made a 2,5 km trek during the nigh. I arrived there 45 minutes before sunrise and spent a few minutes trying to find a nice composition.

This is what I choose in the end. I am pleased with the result. The cracked stone in the foreground creates a nice line across the bottom of the image, a few cloud formed at the top and the mountains took a nice color.

To make it even better I would have preferred to show more of the lake (you can see a little bit at the left of the image), but since I was on a slope leading up I was not able to raise the camera enough to show it.

Aside from that, I really like the result.

Bellow there are a few more images I like in no particular order.

Solo (Cerro Solo)
Laguna Torre, El Chalten, Patagonia Argentina

 

Rojo y Negro (Cerro Mojon Rojo, Cerro Techado Negro)

Laguna Torre, El Chalten, Patagonia Argentina

 

Ratona (Ratona Comun)

Laguna Torre, El Chalten, Patagonia Argentina

 

Cajon de las Sombras (Cajon del Rio de las Vueltas)

El Chalten, Patagonia Argentina

See you around!
Santiago