Iberian Treasures... — Annoying Man With A Camera

Well that was what the brochure called it, and one can call Malaga many things, but in my view 'Treasure' is somewhere down around Thing 99.

So, we decided to go on holiday in the Mediterranean for a week, and through a long and completely illogical series of decisions, made alongside a very bored travel agent, we chose a cruise, our first! She had already suggested we try Ryanair or Easyjet's website by that point to give you some idea of how frustrated she was with us...

Don't judge her too harshly - if it gives you any idea of what the poor woman had to deal with, I'd specified mountains and scenery, he wanted 'somewhere cool like Lanzarote', and we'd helpfully told her that our normal holiday was a secluded cottage in Skye.

She had diplomatically pointed out that at no time can Lanzarote be called 'cool' in any sense of the word, unless you're 19 and going with your mates, and mountain resorts booked at the last minute tend to be stratospherically expensive.

So we compromised on a cruise around the Mediterranean. The feeling was, if it got too hot for him, he could sleep on the balcony and pray there were no freak waves, and I could photograph seagulls.

I'm going to try to stay on topic for this post and not wander off into 'my holiday in the Med'. So what's difficult about going abroad with your camera? Well, nothing, if it's not a very expensive one I guess, but if you're into something chunky with expensive glass to match, quite a whole lot.

Smaller things included switching the camera strap, so the standard Canon one with CANON 5DSr boldly emblazoned on it as a useful guide to thieves was replaced by a more discreet one.

Bigger things included dealing with my anxiety about a momentary slip leading to a long slow plunge over the side (depended on the time of day, sometimes this was about me, or about my camera); sinking and lifeboats; food poisoning; being latched onto by sticky passengers. I got a handy tip from a landscape photographer about managing this kind of stuff - rationalise it, ask, how many times has that happened to you in the past? how likely is it to happen in the future? He was rationalising away fears about being mugged or becoming ill when out in the wilderness.

I thought of all of these and put them in their place, with the possible exception of the sticky passengers. You know, that loud couple who somehow grate on your space, latch onto you and drag down your holiday. That's never happened to me either, but I know it happens to other people, which leads me logically to conclude that we might BE that couple.

Packing, that was probably the biggest actual headache. I had images in my head of the grand old days of ocean liners, huge trunks marked up with 'Not Wanted On Voyage', and I was unduly influenced by a friend's recommendation to watch 'Now Voyager' with Bette Davis (and I can confirm, Tommy, it was absolutely NOT like that in any way...), I was rather surprised to hear there was a total baggage allowance of only 20kg, and your carry-on baggage was limited to 5kg.

I weighed my camera kit and bag, and discovered that it was over 7kg, so then had to decide which bit of my treasured equipment I could do without, and which I could pack into the hold to be lobbed about by some oik on the airport apron.

So the macro lens stayed at home and the zoom lens went in the hold baggage, and I had pretty much worked out that if I left most of my clothes behind, and did not pack the Tux (people still do dress up, apparently), I could just about manage.

The night before we set off, I checked the baggage allowances and OOPS, found that I'd not read the small print about what could be packed where... For example, a monopod - mine resembles a hefty walking stick - I thought as well as stabilising photos, this would be a good way to fend off attackers, but unfortunately clubs are forbidden in hold luggage, so they would have taken a very dim view of it.

Why had I never come across that before? well probably because I have never taken a club on holiday, for exactly the same reason that I usually leave my Swahili spear collection and my rifle at home...

Secondly, I discovered that laptops can't go in hold baggage (needed for backing up photos), so my plan of swathing it in underpants and jumpers in the middle of my suitcase went out the window, and I had to squeeze a full size laptop into the camera bag. Lithium batteries can't go in hold luggage.

And there are all the other anomalies about security on planes. The warnings about letting cabin crew know if your mobile phone gets hot or falls down the seat, set against the fact that you can still carry a lighter on board, as long as you have it on your person? Do not understand the logic of that. All these things might go wrong if they malfunction, but you can, like, set fire to a seat in seconds with a lighter, and as far as I can recall I don't remember seeing sprinklers in any plane I've travelled on previously...

Ours not to reason why. By the following dawn, or rather 4.00am, flight schedules being what they are, I was all sorted.

A lot of work went into my packing, it was a work of art. I took the concept of minimalist clothing down to new levels of omission, everything had a multiple purpose, casual wear, formal wear, and padding for a camera lens.

'Course, you know how this ends, after this skillful Luggage Weight High Art, I get to the airport and they don't even look at my hand luggage let alone weigh it...

Solitude and the time of day.

Ah, so two big problems inherent to cruising. Firstly, there are over 2,000 people on board, and as far as I could tell, most of the committed to getting skin cancer on the sun deck. We all know this of course, it's obvious, 2,000 people in a confined space, have to go somewhere. Yet, interestingly, if you look at the brochure pictures you tend to get something that looks like this:

Actually taken at 9.00pm, brightness cranked up (and over-saturated for the brochure 'look')

When in reality it tends to look more like this...

Advertising, eh?

So, we have a combination of thousands of people, wearing Less Clothing Than Normal, any number of small children also present, and someone wandering around the deck, with this...

Could this look more pervy?

Possibly not. However this is where my natural aversion to photographing people came in handy. In over 1,500 pictures I took on holiday, only two are of the sun deck, and if you look at this one, the 'excuse' is a demonstration of how to stack cocktails, so I'm not really photographing the masses. I also discovered I'm so averse to photographing people that it worked a bit like the machine gun on a Lancaster, as you're following your target around the tailplane, the gun stops firing so you don't shoot your own tail off, so it was with my camera, when it was pointed deckwards, no pictures are taken.

The city excursions were another matter, you just can't avoid photographing people, and I'm pleased to say I managed to break down some of my own barriers for this. Look at this picture of a busy street restaurant, for example...

but also check out the guy on the left with the expletive-ridden tee shirt. I turn round, take a photo of the whole street, and he's looking at me like "Why are you photographing my little girl???"

So it's not just in my head, is it? I only noticed him afterwards.

I think photographers naturally tend to fix in on a part of their photo, probably down to focussing, and don't necessarily clock the whole scene. If I can digress for just one picture, an interesting example of that is a photo I took on holiday in Iceland. We were in Reykjavik, and I just wanted a photo of the hotel we'd stayed in...

Not a particularly remarkable photo is it? and I didn't understand why the man sitting on the bench glowered at me when I walked past them some moments later.

His wife is breastfeeding.

Or, back to the Mediterranean, this interesting gentleman whom I photographed because it was kind of like street art and he seemed to be heavily plasticised...

.....and completely failed to clock the fact that he was floating in thin air until I transferred the photos to my laptop.

But back to the Mediterranean. Solitude, not the easiest thing to find on a cruise ship and the second problem was with light, and the time of day.

For most of the city excursions, I was to find, you set off around 9.30, and they're designed to be short, so that you can come back to the ship for lunchtime I think; Which is why restaurants tend to hate cruise ships. One good example of this is docking at Vigo, to visit Santiago de Compostela, well known Catholic pilgrimage site and probably very beautiful, but after an hour's journey, pulling up around 10.30am, you've got thousands of people infesting every view, and you also have the harsh overhead light of the mid-morning sun which does not often look good in photographs. So no chance of getting the moody early morning or late evening shot. You also only get an hour in the city itself, so the chance of finding the interesting picture down a secluded back street is pretty limited.

However, this was more than compensated for by the fact that each night we were sailing to a new port, and that meant spectacular sunsets and sunrises, with an apparently empty ship (although in some of these shots, taken at 6.30am, there were still people 'booking' sun loungers... and it was overcast...).

And I have to say, overall, the cruise was a brilliant experience. Although there were hordes of large people exposing more bare flesh than was perhaps wise, it was quite easy to avoid them. And even possible to walk among them and 'tune them out', which I suspect is one way people cope with being practically naked 5 inches away from an equally naked stranger on a sunbed.

The Captain also had a very entertaining banter with his Entertainment Officer, Paul, the odd faint innuendo that you knew was being missed by most of the passengers - Paul's comment that 'Porto was a very windy port and the last time we left here it was so windy the captain had to have a tug...'

So, where did we go? We started in Malaga, and first stop was Vigo, in Galicia, so that was a day's sail away, and the stopping off point for Santiago de Compostela. Click on any of the following photos to get them full screen.

Vigo is famous for mussels and seafood generally. In the far distance you can see the mussel beds. In the next shot you can see them more clearly. There's a strict limitation on the number of beds they can have - and because it's big business, each one costs about as much as a house.

The next stop was Porto, a short distance from the port of Leixoes, and a good reason to be up early as we came into the port.

Fishing boats unloading - swarms of gulls because they are cleaning the fish on the dock

The Old Town of Porto is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is absolutely beautiful. Many of the houses are tiled, and some of the churches have raised this to an art form, for example, the Igreja do Carmo - beautiful inside and out.

Two exposures here, focus stacked in the foreground and background.  Tourists on either side were screened out ;) and this was taken on the Luis 1st Bridge.  These banks of Morning Glory cascaded down the hill, blanketing the ruins of old … — Two exposures here, focus stacked in the foreground and background. Tourists on either side were screened out ;) and this was taken on the Luis 1st Bridge. These banks of Morning Glory cascaded down the hill, blanketing the ruins of old buildings

From Porto we went to Lisbon - another beautiful city, but note to self not to try to see it on a Tour Bus... so pretty much no decent photos. From there we went on to Cadiz and I got up early to get another sunrise at sea.

And finally, pulling into Gibraltar