A Terrible Day of Photography on the Piedra de los Pajeros

This week, I climbed half a mile to the Piedra de los Pajeros above Puente Palo to photograph the snow-covered peaks above Lanjaron.

The climb necessitated snowshoes, and progress was slow and hot—the temperature in my house was half what it was outside on the sun-drenched high slopes, and I found myself shedding layers rapidly.

So why do I think it was a terrible day of photography? There was plenty to shoot, I had a great lunch with good company and although the visibility was poor across the peaks, there was a lot of snow and some very picturesque views near the top. But the fact is I screwed up royally!

I had recently climbed above the ski resort area above Granada and got some good pictures of snow there. As a professional photographer, I botched zero shoots in seven years. So what happened this time?

Principally I was fixated on a single photograph. I had it in my mind to shoot another gigapixel panorama. The last one from the Atalaya de Marchal came out well, and I thought snow-covered peaks would make for an even more arresting image. How wrong I was. The only peak to have very much snow on it was the peak I found myself standing on and the haze across the valley to the Sierra Lujar was too much for the camera and assorted software to cope with.

So my panorama turned out to be nothing more than a picture of a pile of rocks with an indistinct background of nothing very much. Sure, there is a lot of detail in those rocks, but no, not a good photograph!

To make matters worse, we descended through a forest that was truly magical in places—and I messed up those photographs as well! The thaw is now in full swing, and so there is little chance of shooting snow in this location again until next year.

So what lessons did I learn, apart from the humbling experience of looking at row after row of botched photos on my computer screen?

In purely technical terms, this means checking your settings and ensuring your focus is spot on before shooting a 22-frame panorama, not after.

On every trip, take three lenses covering the range between 16mm and 200mm. It’s better not to use one than to waste the day because you don’t have one. If you have to leave one at home, make it the middle range. That would have left me a gap between 35mm and 70mm which is manageable. Instead, I left the wide angle lens, leaving a widest lens of 24mm, which admittedly should have allowed me to cope with the forest, but a 16mm would have been better.

Of course, experiences like this are part of the continuous development baked into photography. And it’s the reason most of us are photographers. We know we can always do better. We know it’s not about the technology. The Dunning Kruger effect is a menace that bedevils many photographers on social media. If anyone tells you they know everything, run like the wind. Technology is advancing so fast that even my computer can’t keep up!