A few years ago I went with some of my best friends to Marvão, a small historic village in the Alentejo region of Portugal, near the border with Spain. Being a region renowned for the good food and wine, we would be staying there for a few nights, and then head back to Lisbon to celebrate new year's eve.
We didn't actually stay in Marvão, but in Portagem, another small village just about 3 Km away, because we already knew an inn there that has a fantastic restaurant ('O Sever'). However, even from afar, our attention is always captured by the village of Marvão. It sits atop a cliff with its castle walls right on the edge, looking down on the plain, and fulfilling its long-appointed role of guarding the portuguese kingdom. One night, after a delicious dinner and a good red Alentejo wine, we took a stroll near the margins of the Sever river and, looking up, there were the battlements of Marvão, turned orange from the floodlights, hovering among the clouds, always reminding us that we were being looked after.
At the time I was just starting to get interested in photography. I was reading all the stuff in magazines and books about how important it is for landscape photography to shoot in the "magic light" of dawn and dusk, so I decided to try and put that into practice. Next day, I would get up from my warm bed into the cold , and drive up the hill to get some photos of the sunrise in the castle.
It was about 6 a.m. when the alarm clock rang. I looked out the windows of my bedroom and was utterly disappointed. Clouds were all I could see, not even a little bit of sky. Since I was already awake, I decided to go out anyway. As I drove up, I was thinking that I must be crazy to get out of a warm, comfortable bed to go and look at the fog. Suddenly I noticed some stars in the sky. The higher I got, the more stars I saw and I realized that the fog was only in the valley, not on the hill where I was heading.
I parked the car, picked up my backpack and tripod, and as I walked to the castle I witnessed a show I will probably never forget. The sky was clear, the castle walls were starting to get bathed in a beautiful warm orange light of sunrise, and below, in the valley, there was a blanket of clouds covering everything. As the sun rose, the clouds dissipated, and the air became so clear that looking north I could make out some mountains with a bit of snow on the top, and recognized what could only be the Serra da Estrela mountains even though they were about 200 Km away.
Looking back on this moment, I think that photographing or just appreciating nature is an act of faith. We do all kinds of silly things and sacrifices when we think we may have found the right moment for the perfect photo. We go out in the rain, endure cold, drive hundreds of Km, and get up from our warm beds when others are still asleep, without knowing if we will get what we want (in fact, most of the time, we don't). Yet, something makes us go on and keep trying. Finally when we find the right moment it just compensates for every failure we had so far. It's just like being in love, the only difference being that when we find the right person we stop looking for anyone else. When I find such a perfect moment, though, I embrace it, enjoy it, but keep looking for more new moments. I am sure the new year will bring some more of them.
