A600AASS Day 12 - Villafranca del Bierzo to Las Herrerias
25.10.22
25 Km
Today was my first, real wet weather day. Like, twenty kilometres of walking-in-moderate-to-heavy-rain wet weather. Had I been walking through the outskirts of Ponferrada or Leon, I’d likely have been murderous with rage. But scooching up alongside the rushing Valcarce river towards Galicia, surrounded by ancient forest and lulled by cowbells, I settled in to an enjoyable trance as the rain came down.
Childhood memories came flooding back. Chestnuts on the ground brought me the smell of nuts, roasting on Parisian streets, right before Christmas. The shifting camber through the curves made me think of suspension systems and took me back to the test track at Mercedes’ Sindelfingen factory. It was there, as a 12 year old, I saw a W140 S-Class driven at speed through a steeply-banked turn. It screamed of indomitable quality and composure. The memory — and the thought of carving up the valley — made me pine just a little for the W140 S-Class I left behind in France.
While we walked the old road, the motorway that replaced it cut through the hillsides and skies above. Soaring viaducts carried cars and trucks forwards, the thump-thump of their tires over the expansion joints echoing off the valley walls.
By the time we arrived in Las Herrerias, I was ready for a rest. The next stage sees us climbing six hundred metres over 2.5 kilometres and I didn’t want to attempt that tired and soaked through.
For the past few years, since I bought my Fuji X100F camera, I’ve composed and processed almost all my images in black and white. Composition through a monochrome viewfinder feels, somehow, calmer, while colour feels chaotic; I can better focus on texture and structure when it’s stripped away.
The truth is that I’ve also been afraid to process images in colour. So many opportunities to overdo things. So many filters, each begging for me to try and twiddle with them. So many looks but none of them mine.
By keeping things simple, black and white has kept me safe.
But the X100F has a neat little trick up its sleeve. While it allows me to compose in black and white, and capture in black and white, it also, simultaneously, captures a RAW file. This is made up of the unprocessed signal data from the sensor, which means it’s in colour. So, as you might have noticed, I’m starting to experiment with colour.
In black and white photographs, given enough contrast in the rest of the image, grey, washed-out skies can form part of a graphic composition.
In colour photographs, grey, washed-out skies suck. They draw the eye away from the focus of the image. They’re like a nasty fluorescent light for which I can’t find the off switch.
This email series is being produced entirely on an iPad Pro. Words, images, publishing: everything. It’s been an experiment in keeping things light, but I’ve been impressed with just how much I can do with images on this little glass slab.
Today, I played around with image masks in Darkroom to see if I could beat some bright skies in to submission and, well, at least I’m learning.
Until tomorrow!
