Last winter, a Canadian friend of mine from Duke spent two and a half months in Lima doing an internship at a mining company and we overlapped during the last four weeks of it. One day, she asked me to accompany her to visit art galleries in Barranco and take some photos of the ocean. I used to have a Nikon Coolpix S2600 then (which belongs to my mom now) so I thought accompanying her would be great fun. And it was great fun indeed! We wandered around for a while, visited a couple of galleries, got a coffee at one of my favorite cafés, and, of course, we took a bunch of photos. An epic win!
This excursion was also positive because I discovered an overlook that became one of my favorite places in Lima. This overlook allows you to have a great view of almost the entire Lima’s bay: you can distinguish Magdalena, San Isidro, Miraflores on one side, and Barranco and Chorrillos on the other side! If you’re lucky and it’s bright enough during the summer, you can see San Miguel and part of Callao. How could this place not be a recurrent place to take photos of the bay?
Just next to the overlook there was a building that was still under construction then. Although it seemed mostly finished, nobody lived there apparently. The connection between that specific human construction, the other buildings on the edge of the bay, the sky, and the sea was simply amazing! It definitely needed to be documented! This is the picture taken with Nikon Coolpix S2600 that day, August 3rd, 2012:
Last December, the beginning of summer here, one of the people I love the most -Vera- and I met in Barranco to catch up since we hadn’t talked in months. She didn’t know of the overlook I had discovered so we went there and I took some photos of her catching a glimpse of the ocean. Of course, a photo of the building in the foreground, the bay in the background, the sky covering the upper side of the image, and the sea on the lower left side was necessary. At that point, my mom had gotten the Nikon for I had bought a Canon Powershot A2200 in the States before coming back to Peru for Christmas. So this is the photo taken with the new Canon on December 28th, 2012:
Obviously, the day is brighter, the light tonalities of brown are more noticeable because of the sunlight, the sky is clear in spite of some cirrus floating upon the bay. A quite remarkable difference is how calm the ocean looked in December compared to August. You can also see that there was some progress on the building -at this point, there might have been some people living there actually. The contraposition was so appealing that one of my first posts was dedicated to these two pictures precisely.
But what happens when you add a third camera to the equation “one building plus two photos”? Last week I had lunch with another friend from Duke who came to Lima to do some research. Leigh has already finished her PhD in Anthropology and is like a big sister for me: she picked me up from the airport when I arrived in Durham for the very first time, helped me get a cel phone, and took care of me during those first months of my first year at Duke. So it was great having lunch with her (a picture of the sea food we had that day is coming soon); then we wandered around, and finally got a coffee. After all this fun, she went back to the room she was renting in Barranco to continue working on her research, and I took a walk by the famous overlook. I had my Canon EOS Rebel T3 (bought just before returning to Peru) next to hand so, obviously, I decided to take a picture resembling the ones taken in August and December. This is the photo taken on July 31st, 2013 with the Canon Rebel:
As can be seen, while the Nikon captured diverse tonalities of gray in August, the Canon Rebel T3 captured diverse tonalities of turquoise. The ocean was a bit rough, but it was not as rough as last year. Moreover, clouds seemed to be more gray last year. To balance this situation, we are experiencing one of the coldest winters in decades! Crazy, right? (Have you noticed the Peruvian flag on the top of the building? July is the month when we celebrate our Independence as I mentioned before)
We usually think of photography as a synchronic art and it’s partly true: most of individual pictures register a specific moment in the past (although some are so powerful that they register an entire story behind them instead of just a single moment). But as can be seen when comparing photos, photography can be diachronic as well. As I once posted, compare one of your favorite places during summer and winter (and if you think it looks completely different, add fall and spring if you can). If possible, experiment with different cameras as well. You’ll be amazed by how much fun this experiment is!…
