Saturday, September 13, 2008

the other Cañadas photographs

The real reason for the visit to Tenerife and the Caldera de las Cañadas in particular was to take another sort of photograph from those travel snaps previously posted. Images of less obvious subject matter, in many instances with no inherent scale.

This first images comes from the Minas de San José - wonderful, coloured picon landscapes that straddle the TF-21 midway between Los Roques and Portillo. Picon is composed of small rounded pumice up to 20mm across. the San José picon ranges in colour from green-greys, through yellow-greys to red-greys. And in spite of the numbers of visitors they maintain their dune-like forms and discrete swirling colour bands. And there's very little litter around the place.

This second image comes from the very top of the huge gash in the landscape between Montaña El Cerrillar and Montaña de Arenas Negras. This shows a slab of lava resting on top of layers of pumice. As the pumice is granular it is subject to wind and water erosion, causing collapses in the lava slab.

While these are fairly intelligible images, there is no positivel sense of scale here. Other images of rubble, scrub, and rock have no palpable scale.

There's something worrying about the colouration here that I'm going to have to deal with. It's just a little anachronistic from a technical photographic perspective (think C19th landscape photographs).

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