Here’s the last photo (in this series at least) from our recent Bar­celona trip. I took it under one of the via­ducts in the Park Güell. This park has also been designed by Ant­oni Gaudí (the mas­ter­minds behind the Sagrada Familia) and it fea­tures the fam­ous, col­our­ful ser­pent­ine benches you may have seen in L’Auberge Espagnole.

Although the weather’s not been the best when were there (a bit of the shame, as the place is is covered with col­our­ful mosa­ics which obvi­ously work best in dir­ect sun­shine) we did spent a good amount of time there just wan­der­ing around and admir­ing the crazy /​organic fea­tures and shapes all around.

The photo above shows one of the via­ducts; a great place to hang out when it’s rain­ing ;-) There was not much point in leav­ing it in col­our, as shapes and the inter­play of light and shadow are much more prom­in­ent in mono­chrome. Motiv­ated by Jeff Curto’s won­der­ful Cam­era Pos­i­tion pod­cast (and, for instance, this or this epis­ode), I paid par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the pre­cise pos­i­tion from where I took the cam­era.

At the time, I was con­sciously try­ing to achieve to things: (roughly) bal­ance lights and darks, as well as nicely guide the eye through the pic­ture. As we’re nat­ur­ally attrac­ted to the bright parts, here our eye will start in the top left (gen­er­ally a pop­u­lar point to start read­ing a pic­ture any­way, at least in West­ern cul­tures). It should the con­tinue down along the stairs anti­clock­wise to come under­neath the via­duct and fol­low along the walk­ing dir­ec­tion of the people towards those beau­ti­ful arches. Note also the dark ele­ments at the corners of the frame which help to keep the eyes inside the pic­ture. Also, some amount of patience was required for this shot, as the other people walk­ing around were not always where I would have loved them to be …

But over­all, I really like this pic­ture, and it’s def­in­itely going to be hung up next time I get some pic­tures printed.