I don’t think I have spent so much time on a body of work before. It was time consuming, but so fun to be able to relive my adventures. Putting this together was a real labor of love. I covered all the highlights of my six weeks in Ecuador. I hope that you find it stimulating. For those of you with adult ADHD, feel free to skim. I think you will enjoy the sections on Pasto and Banos the most. For everybody else, I think you will find this is a good read and you’ll learn a lot, both in terms of traveling to Ecuador and improving your photography.
I spent half of December and most of January exploring one of the most wonderful countries I have ever visited; Ecuador. My travels mainly encompassed the middle swath of the country known as the Andes region. It is also known as the “Avenue of the Volcanos.” It’s a land of great valleys and tall mountains peppered with colorful towns, historical cities, lakes, waterfalls, lagoons and rivers. Ecuador’s people are warm, generous and kind, a mixed lot of mestizos and indigenous tribes. I felt welcomed almost everywhere I went. This truly was an epic trip; a lifetime of experiences.
Photographing Ecuador was incredible, due to the wonderful weather. Most of the time, it was cloudy, so no matter what time of the day I was shooting, I never had to worry about excessive contrast. It was like shooting under a giant Soft Box. In most places I would have been taking a nap or reading during the middle of the day, but in Ecuador I was able to take advantage of the cloud cover which gave me many more opportunities to find the perfect shot. Basically, I was able to shoot from sunup to sundown.
This Photo album/blog is going to be a mixture of geography, history, personal anecdotes and of course photography comments/tips, with the hope that you will come away with a deeper general understanding of Ecuador, and how to tackle particular photographic situations. That you will see this body of work through open eyes; literally and figuratively. That you can experience the multiple facets of Ecuador’s culture, that make it unique among the countries of South America.
One of the primary “rules” of photography is learning how to tightly edit. Shooting in RAW, I burned through four 64 gig in the six weeks that I was in Ecuador. That translates to about 8,000 or so photos. I spent about forty five hours or so, editing them. The easiest edits were the first ones, where everything obviously soft, significant exposure issues, images with bad composition, were tossed out. In all I went through all the images four times, rooting out all but the best, which left me with about 780 or so. Of this group there was about fifty that I would consider gallery worthy.
If you have any questions about how any of these images were shot, or would like to order prints, please feel free to shoot me a message on Messenger or email at lleonphotography@gmail.com.
Luciano Leon, APA
