Evening Light on the Torres del Paine

Torres del Paine National Park, Chilean Patagonia (March 2011)

This photo is from a two-week backpacking trip across Patagonia in Argentina and Chile. As anyone who has been to Patagonia knows, this is is a part of the world where the landscapes are so good it’s hard to put the camera down.

I took this photo as I was leaving Torres del Paine National Park after after backpacking in the Park. Driving out, I came over a rise in the road, caught the scene in my rearview mirror of the massif with the last of the sunlight hitting the peaks, the moon already up. It looked too good to ignore. I pulled over, climbed onto the roof of the car, and set up a tripod to grab the shot before the light disappeared.

It was nearly 8:00 in the evening and the sun was dropping fast, the wind was whipping, and this was very much a “take what you can get” moment, only a few frames in quickly changing light at the end of a long day.

There are a lot of things I like about this image: the gradient in the sky, the way the rock, snow, and late sun carve out clean lines across the massif, and the small moon hanging over the scene. It captures how that evening felt—clear, cold, and just a little unreal.

There are also things I’d do differently now. The exposure feels too long enough causing the edges of the moon blur, and the combination of wind and shutter speed left the grass and shrubs in the foreground a bit soft. I’m also not in love with the lower hills. But there’s a saying that a flawed image is still better than no image at all, and on a windy roadside in Patagonia, this was the best version I was going to get before the light disappeared.

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