“The dunes of Corralejo are a fantastic spot to take your Instagram snaps. Head across the road from the beach after you’ve taken your Instagrammable pictures of your perfect self in your pristine white bikini and pose on the perfect white dunes. You’re sure to get thousands of hits. Obviously if you’re among the ninety-nine point nine percent of humanity that doesn’t look like me, then put the phone away, head for a bar in town and stay there until it’s time to fly back to Luton.”
Ok, so I made some of that up – in fact I made up all of the last sentence – but you get the drift. While our visit to Lanzarote in November was packed with a host of obvious objects at which to point the camera, its next door neighbour was going to need a bit more research. I’d been doing a quick spot of online investigation by typing “landscape photography Fuerteventura” into Google and seeing what came up. The first results were features on the “top ten Instagrammable spots” on the island, as seen by various bright and beautiful young twenty-somethings who look like most of us never looked in our twenties. Well, I didn’t anyway. I had a haircut like Ken Barlow, an unrewarding job with a salary that would probably have been illegal after minimum wage legislation was introduced, two demanding toddlers and a permanently harassed expression on my face.
As you can imagine – the word “Instagrammable” wasn’t enormously encouraging, but in the almost complete absence of anything a bit more weighty in the search results, I perused the first couple of articles, trying not to get too irritated by the overriding sense of self congratulation that exuded from them. And while many of the locations were a bit too far from our base on the northern tip of this surprisingly large island, we were only twenty minutes drive from the huge expanse of white dunes that run down the east coast from Corralejo towards Puerto del Rosario. I’d strolled across those dunes before in fact, on a previous visit in the dim and distant past when I was in my mid thirties, and still in no way Instagrammable. Not that the platform even existed then. So while our holiday was not a photography expedition, I would at least have one nearby location on which to focus my lenses. Anything else would be a bonus.
It was a windy afternoon when we came here for the second time. So windy that even one of the ubiquitous horseshoe shaped shelters of black volcanic rock that you find on the beaches here wasn’t protecting us from being liberally sanded by the elements. So, we gave up and wandered across the road to the dunes early. I wanted to return to the area where we’d been a few days earlier, to revisit a composition I’d spotted after the sun had departed. Away from the seafront it was slightly calmer here, a kilometre west of the road, but it was still windy enough to tell me I wasn’t going to be changing lenses today, nor would I be opening the bag unless it was absolutely necessary. At least the continual assault of flying grains was coming from behind as Ali sat in front of a small dune and attempted to read her kindle before giving up and heading back to the car, while I flapped about, trying focus stacks that might never work in the ever changing dunescape. At other times I’d open the aperture wide and bring a single plane into sharpness, letting the rest of the scene soften away towards the edges. It was tough work though, especially because being low down and close to the immaculate foregrounds was an important element of many of the shots. At least I didn’t have to worry about footprints. Turn about and look behind you and you could watch in fascination as they were airbrushed away within a couple of minutes of you making them.
Just to make things interesting, I was carrying two tripods. My light travel tripod that I take on trips like this, and a tiny one that was a present from the very generous Lloyd Austin. The latter would prove to be an ideal resource on the dunes, as I could bring the camera almost to ground level, making the ridges and lines in the sand an important feature of the image. As I was attempting to dislodge some grains of sand that were preventing the legs from closing properly, the camera, currently mounted on the travel tripod toppled over, landing face first in the dunes and coating the polariser in the stuff. I’d already broken two polarisers in the last twelve months so the language was filthy, but this time the soft landing, assisted by the fact that the lens hood was attached, had prevented any more breakages. Minutes later the assembly went over again, this time assisted by my own clumsy fumbling, but once more, thankfully everything remained intact. Unless I wanted to take half of Fuerteventura back to Cornwall a few days later, there would need to be a thorough cleaning of the bag and everything in it later. I’ll bet your average bright young Instagrammer with ninety thousand followers doesn’t have these problems as they wave their iPhone artfully at the scene, posing their perfect tanned self amid the perfect white dunes in their pristine white bikini. I’m not bitter. I can’t even get a proper suntan for goodness sake. While Ali quickly develops a gentle glow, I turn bright orange in the sun, despite slathering myself liberally with factor 30 each day. It’s the Irish blood you know.
And then frustratingly, at the point that the colours should have begun to intensify, the sun found a rare bank of low cloud to hide behind, taking all the shadows and contrasts from the dunes. For a while I wandered about in hope, finding shots that didn’t really work without the soft evening sunshine, and gradually I headed back towards the car with enough of the local product in my boots and socks to make a small sandcastle later. The appearance of those low clouds had also stolen the post sunset scene I’d been so optimistic about, the scattering of high tufts in the sky turning into greys rather than the pinks that we’d seen over the last few evenings. By now, every item of clothing I wore was full of sand – a sure sign that it was time to go back to our apartment and hit the “reset self” button. At least I’d got some Instagrammable results before the sun had made its early exit.
