Patagonia 7: Chilean Fjords

Leaving Puerto Chacabuco our Norwegian Sun cruised at some 15 knots along the Chilean Fjords then the Straights of Magellan to reach the next port: Punta Arenas, Chile.

Here's an early morning grab taken from the foredeck while it powered south at some 15 knots along these watery highways. It took two days along first the Chilean Fjords then the Straights of Magellan to reach the next port: Punta Arenas, Chilé.

Up in the early morning darkness I was curious how the black blotches along each bank of this passage would look in the first sunlight.

Those aren't tilled fields. Nope, this place is virtually uninhabited. Instead the dark areas are dense green growths, the yellower regions are, for some reason, less fertile. Perhaps they're too rocky?

Some 25 hours later Thursday 1/24/19

800 miles nearer to the South Pole, the land grows dramatically craggier and mid-summer temps much chillier.

1519 Along the Chilean Fjords

Imagine how this looked to the 500 sailors in Magellan's 5 wind-blown ships as they discovered these passageways in 1519. Did they imagine that only 17 of them would survive their expedition and get back to Spain two years later?

What passed through their minds as they plowed northward surrounded by these treacherous coastlines and spookily quiet landscapes? Landscapes that remained unchanged from this in the last 500 years.

GEEK STUFF: Hand holding my Canon 7D and its EF-S17-85mm lens on the shifting decks of the Norwegian Sun. Canon's stabilizers are uncanny and it's processor can cut into both the shadows and highlights. 

Patagonia 6: Let Sleeping Sea Lions Lay

This craggy finger pokes from the sea some twelve miles south of Ushuaia, Argentina – the city at world’s end. Here Patagonia’s southern tip slices into the earth’s only spot where three oceans (Atlantic, Pacific, and Antarctic) swirl together to brew storms and tides which conjure fog, rain, snow, ice, gales, wave-surge, and lightening strikes that last moments, hours, or longer.

Detail of a 40 yard-long rock off the coast of Cape Horn

Daytimes, hundreds of night-hunting sea lions doze among this rock’s gnarls. Even at rest, their raucous snoring, burping, farting, and random-yelping eclipse the din of New York’s Cross Bronx Expressway. 

People who come within feet of these lightening-quick 400-500 pound sea mammals risk maiming and death. Sea lions have crushing muscles reinforced by scalpel-honed fangs and claws. Look closely. See their pelts gashed with cuts, holes, and wounds that etch tattoos of damage? 

Not a good plan to tip-toe among them and scream "BOO!" Y'think? 

GEEK STUFF: Despite a wind-whipped hail pelting the catamaran’s pitching deck I hand-held my Canon 7D’s EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens to get close as I dared to the colony of sleepers. Except for some PS-CC diddling with dynamic range in post, this image faithfully reveals the information within the raw capture.

Around noon on Saturday, January 26, 2019.  

Patagonia 1: The Light at World's End

The world's southernmost light just beyond
Ushuaia, Argentina

At the very tip of America del Sur, perhaps three miles south of Ushuaia, the capital of Terra Del Fuego and the southernmost city in the world sits this ragged finger poking into Cape Horn's heavens - shuddering upon the most dreaded waters where three oceans smash at its cold cragged granite.

Geek Stuff: During January and February of 2019 we voyaged for weeks around Patagonia's tip, from Santiago, Chilé to Buenos Aires, Argentina. We sailed through the Channels of The Beagle and Magellan poking in and out of the fjords and down the Avenue of Glaciers. Here in Ushuaia we were halfway and two days after a small typhoon that forced us to flee behind the Chilean islands a way from 22' wind-whipped waves. Atop the shifting deck of our catamaran I cranked up the ISO to hand-held my trusty Canon EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens on its 7D Mark II. Then in post I dragged out a bunch of custom brushes into PS-CC. This thing's a totem! You look at it and the wind howls a choir's anthem.

Somehow it makes you whisper, "Amen"!

Escape: Pepto To Quench Peptic

The Lone Tree
Pebble Beach, California

Six weeks ago my wife Rita had her knee replaced. A bit before  I moved my office from the Business2Business Magazines HQ, here to our home. Four, or so weeks ago, my buddy Rocco-The-Dog died. Last week we bought a new pup. During this, Rita's sister and brother-in-law came for a five day visit.

And, of course, the monthly magazines I edit came out on schedule on the first of this month. Life went peptic...

Photography's my baking soda: Pepto to quench life's peptic waves. It can be smoothed into the slower moments, massaging at angst and melancholy. This art stuff's is angst processor, dialing it down, or sometimes blotting it out.

Anxiety's tentacles can't hold onto feelings focused on say, the Lone Tree that clings to its Pebble Beach rock cropping into the Pacific. For at least the hour, or so, that I visited this place my mind-muscles floated free of the churning world so I could return to it with stress cranked way down.

I'm not whining. Rita's recovering wonderfully. This knee now matches the other she received a decade ago and its already improved her mobility and comfort exquisitely. I still ache for Rocco's company, but little Musser's fun and filling the void.

Here's Musser yesterday... All 9 weeks of him.

Okay, I found time in moments when the winds were quieter over the past five or so weeks to escape into my images, but didn't open minutes to think about the comments visitors left here below, nor have I responded to mail. That all wanted me to think, and while thinking's totally exciting, the swirl of these weeks demanded time to turn off thought and excitement and to wallow in the Pepto of places like Pebble Beach, y'know?

But... I'm baaaaaack! There's more time to refocus and to have the energy to think as well as feel. Still, it's a blessing isn't it to have this art narcotic ready when we need to mellow away for a bit, and crank down life's peptic volume?

Cliffs, Crags, Prows

Looming ships of

Ancient giants

Slice deep and 

Through foamed

Enigma.

The Cliff of Mohr guard the southwest coast of Ireland. Imperfectly though: Their walls breached by Celts, Vikings, Normans, and Brits - but never by Romans. 

Confronted by mid-day sun – The photographer's nightmare – I chose a hand held five piece panorama with my Canon 7D through its ES-S17-85mm at f/14 - 1/400 dialing an ISO of 1000. Then significant stitching and post processing with PS4 involving custom textures and various adjustments layering with AlienSkin and Topaz Suite tools. In order to deal with the searingly burnt-out mid-day skies, the clouds are hand painted in PS4 as are the mists. 

Reconsolidation

Reconsolidation: Some profession, maybe the psychologist's, created that word which means, "the moment you remember is the moment you forget." Here's a promontory poking from Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway into the gush of the North Sea. Immovable object slams into irresistible force. Or maybe the other way around? 

The camera stops time in sharp focus... but reality does neither of those things. Impressionism explains memory from a stream of glances. It's been written that, "an artist's vision is centered in wonder rather than in an eye." Art pokes into recollections to pluck out what we cannot see. Never saw. What we remembered or felt. Feeling's what impressions are about. 

Art without wonder is merely craft.

The Giant's Causeway's southern end sits here on the Northern Coast of Ireland pointing toward it's other side eleven miles to Scotland. It is one of Britain's most visited natural site. See that sky, only minutes before it drove a May hailstorm hard at us.

Canon 7D, EF-S17-85mm, ISO 150,  Triple image pano knit in PS4 for dynamic range adjustments. 

Dunluce Castle's In Ruin!

Okay, yeah... it's a hair pretentious, huh? But fun though. I found this frame among the collection at the National Gallery in Washington. They let us photograph all of the masterpieces since, well, we own them... Right? Anyway, the image is another one I grabbed last month in Ireland.... Here's the scoop... This is

Dunluce Castle is a now-ruined 13th century medieval castle in Northern Ireland. It is located on the edge of a basalt outcropping in County Antriim, and is accessible via a bridge connecting it to the mainland. The castle is surrounded by extremely steep drops on either side, which may have been an important factor to the early Christians and Vikings who were drawn to this place where an early Irish fort once stood.

In 2011, major archaeological excavations found significant remains of the "lost town of Dunluce", which was razed to the ground in the Irish uprising of 1641. It may have contained the most revolutionary housing in Europe when it was built in the early 17th century, including indoor toilets which had only started to be introduced around Europe at the time, and a complex street network based on a grid system. 95% of the town is still to be discovered.kay, yeah... it's a hair pretentious, huh? But fun though. I found this frame among the collection at the National Gallery in Washington. They let us photograph all of the masterpieces since, well, we own them... Right? Anyway, the image is another one I grabbed last month in Ireland.... Here's the scoop... This is


Dunluce Castle is a now-ruined 13th century medieval castle in Northern Ireland. It is located on the edge of a basalt outcropping in County Antriim, and is accessible via a bridge connecting it to the mainland. The castle is surrounded by extremely steep drops on either side, which may have been an important factor to the early Christians and Vikings who were drawn to this place where an early Irish fort once stood.

In 2011, major archaeological excavations found significant remains of the "lost town of Dunluce", which was razed to the ground in the Irish uprising of 1641. It may have contained the most revolutionary housing in Europe when it was built in the early 17th century, including indoor toilets which had only started to be introduced around Europe at the time, and a complex street network based on a grid system. 95% of the town is still to be discovered.

And now for the GeekStuff: Canon 7D, w/Canon EF-S17-85 IS USM, F/16@1/800, ISO 1000. 6 image pano, merged in PS4: AlienSkin, SnapArt... mixed media: Oil, Watercolor.