I always have the feeling that the places I visit look better at the 1'st time.

Or... Probably I tend to be luckier whenever I face some situation for the 1'st time... A couple of years ago I spent some time in the south-eastern part of Portugal during spring (inner Alentejo), the fields where amazingly filled with colorful flowers and I came back home with the impression that would go back every year and shoot more under those amazing conditions...


After that 1'st year spring time in this are has not been nowhere near in terms of abundance of flowers, color and my good mood. This year I came back with the idea that I should never take what I have in front of me for granted, every situation is unique and we should live it to it's fullest, because what we see will probably be the better things will get in a long time...

Going back to that 1'st year... Although fields where filled with flowers, skies where always flat white during the time I was there. Due to this, none of my color slide pictures show any sky at all...

Some times i resort to black and white and specially Infrared in order to pull something out of the sky that's apparently not visible...

In this case I was just hopping not to burn it completely so that I would be able to bring it to a ligth gray tone in post processing without making it look strongly manipulated. As usual I shot this scene with the Bronica SQA + 50mm lens loaded with Maco IR820c and the B+W 092 IR filter and did an average metering (without caring about the sky) at ISO 6.

In reality, this was a green field dotted with white flowers. One consequence of using infrared in these situations is that the flowers almost disapear from the image as the green grass will be rendered equally white.

As usual, I've also shot this scene with a regular black and white film, using an orange filter. In that other version the flowers really standout from the grass. I still prefer this version as it simplifies things to the simple forms of hills in the distance and the path leading to them. I also learned from this situation that not every infrared image needs a dramatic dark sky to work and that high key/low contrast images are also allowed and truelly meaningfull whenever infrared comes into play.

This year i kept thinking about this image and the fact that I would be able to do something similar even if there where no flowers... Still, the sensation that things are not as pleasing to the human eye as they where that 1'st time kept me from looking for something like this...