In this week’s video, you can see how we work looking for locations to prepare for an upcoming photo shoot with Carla in the Vall d’Aran. You can also listen to Auri explaining the day and her experiences.
We wanted to do a spring shoot in a waterfall that was big and beautiful enough and in a high mountain setting. To find the locations, Auri and I headed to the Aran Valley in Lérida to find that perfect setting that we could use in later sessions with Carla.
I already knew the place, I had been there many times and it is one of the charming places that have always amazed me.
The waterfall has easy access, which is one of the things it is advisable to look for on a shoot so that you can have all the equipment at hand and not have to make long journeys as we were moving a lot of material.
The idea was to spend a day looking for locations around the waterfall and in the surrounding mountains.
In order to access the top of the mountain, which is reached by an unpaved road, we took the quad in the van so that we could explore the part of the road with the quad in case it was in very bad condition, and to avoid the van suffering a lot and more, loaded with all the photography and video equipment.
As usual when we arrived we found that the weather was not exactly on our side.
During the morning we were recording shots and planning photos in the area of La Laguna which is in a valley just below the waterfall and in the waterfall itself which was coming down with a lot of water and did not allow us to take any microstock photos of the ones we usually take when searching for locations to have some samples.
We couldn’t even try to get the model into the water to take the health and wellness photos, because as you can see in the video and in the attached photos there was a considerable amount of water, and because of the steam from the waterfall itself, everything within 20 metres got wet. In addition, the very low temperature and the cloudy day added more negative points.
This is a photo of the waterfall, which we took months later, so that you can see the difference between going at one time of the year or another. The ideal for a session, obviously, is this scenery.
On a curious note, there was a dead cow in the valley that had been almost completely devoured by vultures.
Once we had recorded enough shots to make the making of and planned all the photos that could be taken in the area, we had lunch and got the quad out of the van.
The idea was to explore the highest part of the surrounding mountains and find landscapes beautiful enough to make a session of any subject that can be set in a high mountain landscape.
What we couldn’t imagine, apart from the bad weather, was the amount of snow on the top of the mountain because just two days before an unexpected snowfall had fallen totally out of season. For that reason, we could not get to explore the highest part of the mountain because the snow did not let us pass making the path inaccessible.
In spite of everything, we could see at the top that the area had possibilities and, above all, we could see that the road was suitable for a normal vehicle, which would allow us to go up later with the van and all the equipment to do the session.
That is exactly what we did in the 2 days session with Carla, which we will upload soon and in which we were able to take pictures both in the waterfall and in the mountain. Here you have some of them as a preview.
Although we couldn’t do everything we wanted to do, I must admit that it was great fun to go up that road with the quad and trample a bit of snow, which is always a pleasure with this kind of vehicles.
Auri also drove it for a while and I think she had an even better time than me.
As an anecdote, in the highest part of the mountain where the snow did not allow us to pass, we found a car stuck and for two hours we were removing snow from under the car to help the driver to get it out of there.
This wasted valuable time and also meant that we were unable to do or record everything we had set out to do.
But as always, we made the best of what the day had to offer, and we enjoyed being in those beautiful surroundings, driving the quad on small paths, good company, an impressive waterfall at any time of the year and all those natural surroundings that make you fall in love.
At dusk and before it got dark, we decided to go down to avoid getting caught in a storm at the top of the mountain and at night we packed up, loaded the quad back into the van and went back home.
In this video you can see the landscapes in which we did the session with Carla that we will upload next week.
Great content! Keep up the good work!
Thank you! Location scouting is a very important part of planning a photoshoot, and competing with the best in the world, you have to make the shootings very productive, and without good pre-planning it’s impossible.