Photography Blog: Northern Chile

Today I will tell you about a country that is located at the end of the world. A country so long that it is on three continents. A country where the strongest earthquakes in human history have been recorded. If you go to Chile, you will find beautiful landscapes, mountains higher and more remote than any mountain in Europe, deserts drier than any desert in Africa, frozen areas colder than Iceland, beautiful semi-tropical islands one of a kind and all these places are inhabited by warm people with a beautiful smile on their faces.

Yes, my friends, if you go to Chile, you may not return to your homes because this place could become your home. A country that, statistically, its inhabitants do not regularly leave, because Chileans love Chile and I can assure you that that can be felt in every corner of the country.

Today I will tell you about the central and northern part of Chile, an area I never explored as a resident, but living abroad I came back to discover everything I had missed for so many years.

This blog will take place during my last two trips to Chile, in November 2019(Part I of the blog) and February 2020(Part II of the blog).

In November 2019 I traveled to Chile to visit my father and family, I stayed about 4 days in my city of birth; Coquimbo, and then set off to one of the most visited and famous places in Chile; The Atacama Desert. Here the most frequented place is the community of San Pedro, a beautiful place in its way with delicious food and much more than you would expect from a town in the middle of a desert in South America. Of all the excursions I did, only once I went on an excursion with a Chilean, the rest were all German, French, English, Brazilian, or Spanish. Unbelievable, I felt like a foreigner in my own country, everything I saw was new and impressive. I simply let myself be amazed by the beauty of this country.

In this opportunity I didn't fly the drone at any time because it is forbidden in almost all the territory of the national parks, so most of the photos you will see were taken with my Canon EOS R.

The photographic objectives of this trip were the dunes in the desert, flamingos, and the valley of the moon.

I went on this trip with my dad, with whom we hadn't done anything together for a long time. We flew from La Serena and just after landing at the Calama airport, we went in a transfer to San Pedro to start the next day the exploration of the Moon Valley. We traveled around a lot during the day looking for good places to take pictures until we finally decided to stay at the top of a hill to wait for the sunset.

Strangely enough, the dunes I wanted to photograph, I thought I had photographed them on the first day in the Moon Valley, but I was wrong. Although that day I left quite satisfied with the photos I had taken, the last day of my stay, I found by chance the dunes I wanted to photograph in the Mars Valley.

Note: Here you can see how the light can change the picture drastically depending on the angle, with which the light inside the lens.

For the following days, we visit different places like Laguna el Cejar, la piedra del Indio, la laguna de Los flamencos, Los Ojos del Salar, and many other places.

Flamingos - Somewhere in AtacamaCanon EOS R + Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L II/ ISO 125 - f/8 - 1/800 sec. — Flamingos - Somewhere in Atacama
Canon EOS R + Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L II/ ISO 125 - f/8 - 1/800 sec.

Many of the photographs were taken in hard light, so when editing them I lowered the contrast to make the image look more balanced. For photos with water and a lot of light, I recommend using a circular polarizer to eliminate unwanted reflections, but be careful that the colors get saturated very easily making them look unnatural.

Comments: Be careful using very large apertures (1.4-2.8) because the photo could lose sharpness and on the edges of clear areas chromatic aberrations could appear.

This trip to Chile served me quite well to reconnect with my dad and catch up on things that were going on there, definitely a great trip with great emotional value. In a second of the blog, I will tell you about my second trip to Chile in February 2020.

This picture belongs to the second part of the blog that I’ll be sharing on Sunday(Part II here)

Photography Blog: Northern Chile

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