Morning on the Argentine Steppes

Near El Calafate, Argentina — 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.

This photo was taken on the Argentine side of Patagonia while heading toward the Perito Moreno Glacier. The landscape naturally falls into clean horizontal bands: dry steppe in the foreground, a narrow strip of water, and the dark mountain slopes rising into the central glacier. That layering is what made me stop — the scene lined up almost perfectly as a series of stacked fields.

What holds the image together is the way the colors transition from warm yellows and browns in the grassland to cooler blues in the lake and deep shadows in the mountains, with the glacier sitting as a bright, centered focal point. The overcast sky doesn’t add much drama or texture, but it keeps the tonality subdued and pushes more attention onto the landforms themselves. It’s a straightforward, structured view of this approach to Perito Moreno, more about shape and scale than about dramatic light.

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