A week today, I’ll be heading back out to northern Argentina. I am going a week early before my ‘photo tour’ begins, as I wish to spend some private time making some new photographs.

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The last time I was here was in 2017. That is five years ago! The photographs you see above were made on my last visit to the Puna de Atacama.

There are several beautiful areas of the Puna, and all I can say is that the region is vast. The Altiplano of Bolivia is big, but the Puna is even larger, with longer travelling distances. I’ve decided to return a week early as I feel I haven’t really been able to make the kinds of photographs I would like to of the red clay area you see in the last three images above. The locals call this region ‘los Colorados’, and there is just a hint of the colour of these clay hills in the first image on the left: when the sun begins to set, the last rays seem to kiss the background hills causing contrasts and shadows of the foreground hills. It’s rather fleeting and what irked me most was that my guide made better images than I did on his iPhone, and a lot more of them as well !

My plan is to camp out near these red clay hills for a few days, so my guide and I have access to them for sunrise and sunset. It will be cold as the elevation is 3,600m.

I’m also looking forward to returning to the Cono de Arita with my photo group. It is a special small volcano which tends to offer up some very graphical contrasts during sunset.

I’ve got a few more projects lined up for this summer: a return to Brazil and also some hiking to a special place in Iceland this summer. More on these projects later. In the meantime, I hope you are managing to shake off the Covid cloud of non-travel, and that you can venture forth, into the world. There is so much still to see and most of it hasn’t been photographed well yet. I wish you all the best,