The Road to El Chalten

New Journal 5 – The Road to El Chalten

Sitting at my computer one morning in our hotel in El Chalten, I was lucky to have enough internet to check my emails and load facebook –  a rare occurrence in this internet-starved town. The manager of the hotel walked by as I was responding to a facebook comment on one of my images. ‘Great photo!’ he exclaimed. He asked to see some more, which I was happy to do. Within 5 minutes he had half of his staff around my table checking out my portfolio, asking me to show them the before and after images. It’s not often I get a real-life response from my photos since most of my work is online.

It turned out the manager recently purchased a DSLR and was becoming quite the photography-enthusiast. He enthusiastically told me about a spot just outside of town that had a great view of Fitzroy, the tallest mountain in Patagonia. I thanked him for the advice and said I’d probably visit the spot that evening. Instead, he insisted on driving us there for sunset to show us the best spots.

Come early evening he was waiting outside the hotel for us, as promised. When we arrived at the spot I had to agree that it was indeed a great viewing point for the mountain.

I was resolute on getting the composition you see above, and being a quiet road I knew I wouldn’t be in too much danger by standing in the middle of it taking pictures.

At one point, however, a car came flying over the hill towards me. I heard it at the same time that Rachel called over to me with a warning. There was a lot of distance between me and the car so I casually walked onto the side of the road. The driver slowed down and was visibly annoyed. In Spanish he was basically telling me that I was an idiot. In my politest Spanish I apologised. He continued ranting. My attention span died. I started looking away from the car to potential compositions. He got more annoyed. At this point, my lack of tolerance for bad manners got the best of me and I told the man I had nothing more to say to him and that he should carry on driving. Angrily, he sped off.

I returned to the hotel manager who promptly told me that the angry fella is well known in the region as being a miserable sod.

Later that night Rachel and I would walk along the same road to try to capture the Milky Way. Rachel proved herself to be a big wimp by being scared of the dark.

Today’s Photo – The Road to El Chalten

This is the image I captured before angry man began his rant. Shooting at 52mm rather than a wider focal distance gives us a mild compression effect which magnifies the size of the mountain against the foreground. It didn’t look that close in real life.

Before the Joys of Post-Processing