Here's to lost opportunities

Sometime ago I was introduced by a very good friend of mine, Ana, to her husband who works for National Geographic Portugal. We wanted to meet for quite some time, and the opportunity presented itself over a japanese dinner in one of my favorite japanese restaurants in Lisbon.

While eating delicious sushi and sashimi, he told me that the magazine was looking for some photos of Lisbon for an article about light pollution. I did not have any good photos for the article but I told him I would try to come up with some. Now this was not an easy task. I am not a professional photographer and I normally come out of work late, so I don't really have much time after work to go and photograph. The only time I had were weekends but I only had one weekend to do it because he needed the photos in the following two weeks.

To add up to my bad luck, in the saturday I went out to photograph it rained a lot and some of the main arteries in Lisbon had no traffic at all. The ideas I had about shooting light trails from cars passing by in the city went literally down the drain. I had to come up with other ideas so I remembered going to the other side of the river, to the Christ Redeemer sanctuary. We can get a pretty good view of the city from there and we have the added benefit of framing the bridge as well. No luck once again. The sanctuary closed at 6pm and at that time it was not dark enough yet for the city to have any lights.

Yet my trip to the sanctuary showed me the city in a different perspective. I had only been there when I was a kid and I barely rememberd the view. I returned there two weeks later, not in time for the photo to be in the National Geographic article, but the hour had changed from daylight savings time and at 6pm it was dark enough to have a great show of lights from the city, so I started snapping away. This is one of the shots I liked best, although it's a rather unusual composition. The statue of Christ the Redeemer had already been decorated with some lights for Christmas, and I ended up putting those lights on the top of the frame, making it look like that there was raining light from the sky into the city.

I may have lost an opportunity to finally have a photo published but I ended up discovering a great spot to look at my city in a different way...

New day, new year, new moments

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.

Whose privilege ?

It's about 5 o'clock PM. The leaflet in my hands says that we will be given thermal sailing outfits during the whale-watching trip, even though when we board the Haukur, the temperature is mild, so I'm wearing just a polar fleece and a windproof jacket. Mild, for Husavik, a harbor town in the north of Iceland, is more or less what I'm used to in winter, in Lisbon, my home city. Still I think that what I'm wearing is enough, but when the boat starts leaving the harbor and gaining speed, the chill goes right to my bones. I put on my gloves and wool hat, and prepare myself for the three hour trip.

The Haukur (icelandic for Hawk) is a two-mast schooner, the last of its kind in Iceland. According to our guide, Nils, these boats were used for shark fishing on the 19th century, and this particular boat, even though it was not a schooner originally, was converted in order to recreate the feeling of sailing in the northern Atlantic. It is now used for the "Whales and Sails" trip, in the bay of Skjalfandi, off the coast of Husavik.

For some time we went on without seeing any animals, but Nils kept reassuring us that North Sailing had a 95% record of sightings and that he himself had seen whales on every trip he went on, so we were confident. I was hoping to see some humpbacks, given that they are the most playful species, and I secretly had the hope of photographing some whale breaching. Our first encounter, though, was with a white-beaked dolphin. We followed him for a while but eventually he got tired of all the attention and went his own way. After a while we spotted another animal and this time there was no mistake, it was a humpback. This one however, was a bit shy, and all I could get was a glimpse of a white flipper but it was too quick for me even to try and take a photograph.

We were still near the place where we spotted the humpback when I saw the captain point to the horizon and heard him shout "Blue Whale !". Now if you follow these stories, particularly one of my first ones, you have a pretty good idea of how I felt when I heard him. My bones chilled again, but this time not because of the weather. I could not believe I would be near the biggest animal ever to live on the planet. At first we could only see the spouts, but even the spouts were huge, going 5 or 6 meters high, or sometimes even more.

As the boat approached we noticed that it was not one blue whale but a couple. And they were feeding, oblivious of our presence. The boat slowed down almost to a halt and we just stayed there admiring these magnificent animals. I could only see the last third of their bodies when they came out of the water, but it was enough to see that they were gigantic. The flukes (tail fins) alone were about 5 or 6 meters in diameter, about the length of the boat. At some point one of the animals passed right under the boat because I saw part of its body come out of the water near the hull, still I was not afraid. These animals could turn the boat or smash its hull anytime they wanted, however they were just happy to be there feeding. It makes me think that nature, no matter how powerful, will respect us if we treat it with respect.

After we left, we passed Lundey (Puffin Island), to watch some puffins, and on our way back the captain stopped the engines, and unfurled the beautiful red sails of the Haukur. There was not much wind, just a breeze, but it would be enough to take us back to Husavik. As soon as the engines stopped we could just sit back and listen to the waves. Soon after, Nils offered us some hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls, and told us that it's an old custom, if the captain thinks his crew is worthy, to give them some of his rum. It is called "Captain's Privilege". It turned out we were worthy enough, so we formed a small queue and one by one he poured a few rum in our mugs of hot chocolate. As I drank, feeling the beverage heat my throat, I thought about the experience I had just witnessed. The rum may be the captain's privilege, but being near a pair of the biggest animals that ever lived on Earth, in their own environment, is something that not many people will be able to witness in their lifetime. That, was my privilege.