To Speak of Yacila

And so i returned to Trujillo.

i feel like i could end up having a lot to say in this update.

Which means that probably i will try to say those things that i have to say, and then fail in the process.

On the upside (hopefully it’s an upside?), i have a few pictures that are newer than a month old for this update, definitely giving it a trump card over most of my updates lately.

Don’t get too excited, though… they won’t be anything to write home about.

Unless you are me… in which case that is exactly what you are doing right now.

So get excited, mom…

Mmm… where should i start. i will start tangible. That way i can make sure i say those tangible things that should be said before i get so convoluted in abstraction that i forgot what tangible things i wanted to say.

i will start by saying that i traveled from Piura to Yacila. Getting to Yacila consisted of catching a one hour bus to the town of Paita, and then a 15 or 20 minute taxi (unless it is a 40 minute taxi, which it can at times easily be… but that is a different story entirely) to Yacila.

Yacila is a fishing town. It is not a large town by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is it small. i would estimate—without having consulted the trusted goodness of fallingrain.com—that its population is in the area of 400-500. Its economy is completely dependent upon fishing.

The taxi dropped me off on the beach. i threw my backpack—a much lighter backpack than i have had the pleasure of hauling around for most of the trip… the joys of packing for only three days—on my shoulder and… went somewhere. Most of the somewheres i went for the first five minutes ended up being nowheres… but i soon found a somewhere that seemed to work, and there i went.

Yacila is built around a small beach. On the south end the beach is braced by a cliff that rises about 80 feet vertically out of the ocean. There is no access to this cliff, though, because the fishing industry has developed the area immediately next to the cliff. This left north as my only option.

The beach stretches probably about a quarter of a mile. The southern half is filled with small private fishing boats, while the northern half is actually gratuitous recreational beach. The ocean is clogged with more boats just a short distance away. The ones in the water look more comfortable than the ones on land.

Imposing rock structures seemed to block my passage on the north end of the beach. Frustrated that i could find no easy way over them, i was contemplating a long hike around them—a particularly frustrating contemplation because i wasn’t eager to carry my backpack too far, for at this point in the trip i have degenerated into a bit of a pansy—when i saw that there was actually a fairly large opening in the towering spires… a sort of natural door.

i turned around from the other side of the door to take this picture back towards Yacila… and i apologize that once more i have a terrible selection of Yacila pictures… i didn’t do a very exhaustive documentary of the area… i have struggled even to take pictures at all lately… but here is one.



45 minutes—and two more surprising “doors” in seemingly impassable rock structures—later i found myself faced with what seemed to be a fairly decent, fairly remote beach. i pitched my tent and pulled out my tripod for a few pictures.

i didn’t understand why at the time… but my camera adamantly refused to make anything remotely approaching an appropriate exposure with my 18-200mm lens… the lens that i probably take at least 80% of my pictures with, and probably 99% of my landscape pictures with. After a little bit of playing with manual exposure—underexposing horrifically from what the auto-exposure meter suggested—i managed to get an exposure that didn’t make me want to throw up. i framed this scene looking back towards Yacila… which includes your friendly 80 foot cliff and fishing fleet, but not Yacila itself. Fear the angry waves of rising tide.



i feel like this picture is kind of a two-year regression in photographic merit… but it communicates the point that i want to communicate here. My friendly beach was also filled with friendly crabs… teeming with them, in fact. i don’t know how to explain it… but if they were of such a mind, they could easily have eaten me in less than 15 minutes, i think, if they worked together hard enough. This picture doesn’t exactly scream “TEEMING!”… but at least it has a few crabs in it. That’s better than i can say of the pictures that don’t have crabs in them. It would be embarrassing to try to use one of those to make a point about crabs.



Finally… this is the picture that struck me with a terrible clarity of why i couldn’t get pictures to expose properly off of my 18-200…

This picture kind of makes me angry. i want to throw something expensive—anything expensive—at something hard—anything hard—when i look at it. But i usually decide not to, because i’m just a poor college student who emptied his bank account so he could be alone for three months. The future is indeed bright for me, my friends.

And it is still a pretty picture… and that’s nice… i like pretty pictures and all… it’s just not a good picture. What i saw was a good picture, what i took was a bad picture, and for once it wasn’t my fault.

i would prefer that it was my fault.

i stopped down to f/. 20.0 and framed a composition that balanced the driftwood and the small ridge that marks the high-tide line against the cliff in the background, sure to include a little bit of the ocean for context. i was careful to stay at 90 degrees off axis from the sun in order to use my polarizer filter to greatest effect. With an aperture of f/. 20, the picture would be acceptably sharp from three feet to infinity… which is nice, since that’s kind of what i was going for.



Unless crabs have eaten both of your eyes, this picture is not sharp. Oh, it’s sharp enough at three feet… but at infinity… well… f/. 20? i may as well have used f/. 5.0.

Wait… f/. 5.0? That seems like exactly what my shutter speed was set for, even if my aperture was set to f/. 20 (which should require a substantially longer shutter speed). i did some checking… and sure enough, it appears that my 18-200 now takes all pictures at f/. 5.0, whether i have aperture set to something different or not. This may or may not ever be solved… but i can promise you that unless God decides to bring healing to my lens, it won’t happen here in Peru. Which means that not only am i tremendously unmotivated, but i also don’t have the lens that i take probably at least 80% of my pictures with. Don’t expect many more pictures from this trip… which is pathetic, since i’ve only taken around 6600 during the whole trip. Which is not many when you consider that i was hoping to take 15,000. i guess that’s what happens when you take the month of July off.

My fragile psyche was not helped by the revelation of the death of my lens. i threw my stuff in my backpack and went back to Yacila, where i spent the next two nights in a hotel room… not doing much of anything. Sounds like the rest of the past month of this trip.

From Yacila to Piura, from Piura to Trujillo… where now i write from the ever-hospitably opened home of Pastor Tito Sevilla, with whom i have worked extensively in the past.

i’ll be here for a little over a week. i currently tentatively hope to travel to Lima on the evening of August 6—to arrive on the morning of August 7—to take three days of retrospection and vision-seeking before returning back to the states on August 10. Hopefully i’ll update two or three more times before returning home… and if there is any continuing interest whatsoever… then i will continue my blog at least until i work through the photo sets that i have picked out. i probably have a good six or seven left—well… good isn’t guaranteed to be an appropriate adjective… but the point stands, i suppose.

And will there be any additional new material in that time?

The short answer is that i wouldn’t bank on it.

But perhaps you’re not content to settle for the short answer. If you are… then i suppose that you can stop reading now. But i have a small feeling that perhaps people who have already gone through the trouble to read all of this have expectations of a little bit more on the point than that. For those of whom this is true… you are, as always, invited and welcomed to read on, but by no means compelled or obligated to do so.

i’m not going to get into all of specifics that i could relate, because i think that many of them would not belong on a forum so public as this even if i could reduce them to words in such a manner as they deserve… but i will say that this has been a very difficult summer for me personally in a number of different ways… which has caused me to focus on points in my life other than photography, consequentially leaving over little passion or energy or inspiration or motivation for photography. i wish this was not so, but i do not regret it.

But further… as i have had a little bit of contact with other people that i know in the past month… and as i have communicated with people that i know who have just returned from fairly long trips overseas… i have become more and more convinced that the difficulties of the solitary photographer overseas are not limited to the emotional strain of being alone. i suppose that i am kind of getting at this point backwards… that most people would recognize the logistical struggles and then be caugh off guard by the emotional struggles… but i was more prepared for the emotional struggles—as pertains only to photography—than the logistical struggles.

My photography for this trip was dual in vision. i desired to take fine art landscape pictures and socially relevant photojournalistic pictures. i have largely failed on both counts.

My vision for fine art landscape pictures involved remoteness. i desired to go into the mountains to places to which other people do not go, places that are remote, difficult to access, and beautiful… and there to take most of my landscape work. But traveling alone… that is extremely difficult. A very confident, fit, well-adjusted backpacker/photographer could still do it, i suppose… and while i am in decent shape, i have greatly lacked confidence and have not adjusted well to being alone this trip. So i am unable to get very remote, which has made it difficult—though not impossible—to get the landscape photos that i desired.

As for the socially relevant photojournalistic photos… my vision from these pertained to extremely remote mountain settlements—much more remote than Choco—and these didn’t work out for much the same reason as my landscape photos… or to pretty rough urban areas… and i tried to make a list of things that seemed like better ideas than going to rough urban areas alone and waving around a big camera. The list went something like as follows: Get in a hugging match with a boa constrictor. Practice my fire-breathing act at a gas station. While on foot, play chicken with a semi. Juggle running chainsaws. Drink lots of battery acid. i couldn’t think of anything else.

So… i’ve been struggling to take pictures… and for many more reasons than those. Those are just a few. Now my lens with the widest range of uses is stuck at an aperture that i use for almost nothing and home is crawling into sight… so don’t bank on any new work before i get home.

All of that said… it would be a lie to say that i do not greatly enjoy taking pictures.

And i think that i am going to here conclude, for now… no pictures from Choco… because the next pictures that i’m going to post from Choco are a series… and it is going to be a long series. A series, in fact, so long that i just decided that i am going to cut it in half… the first half will consist of four pictures, the second of five. Get excited. The subject matter is unexpected.

And as a parting word of advice—you just knew that i wouldn’t get away without a Choco picture, eh?—don’t ever let those nasty llamas of Choco even think about biting your feet.



But yet those trees are weak and small, and what proof that they shall grow at all?