448 - Chichén Itzá
If I were to describe any place as a burning tourist hell, I don’t think anywhere would fit the bill better than Chichén Itzá in Mexico.
We arrived at precisely 7:30AM to beat the opening crowd, but that didn’t matter. Even at that ungodly hour of the morning, there was a line of at least 200 people in front of us to buy tickets. I’m not exaggerating- it looked like we were entering a football game.
However, from the pictures we’d seen, this place looked worth it. The main feature was a massive Mayan temple that had been infamously well preserved.
As we waited in line with vendors yelling to us about sombreros that were “basically free,” I contemplated my prior experiences at ruins. I was having a hard time getting exceptionally good shots for several reasons. For one, tripods weren’t allowed, and secondly, they almost always opened well after sunrise and closed before sunset.
This time, I was determined to get a solid shot off the entire pyramid, be it daylight or not. For some reason I had this weird mindset that blue, mid-day lighting skies weren’t very good for photos. And it’s true, for most shots- it’s called the ole’ golden hour rule. But I felt like I was at a point in my landscape photography career where I needed to learn to break this rule…
Once we bought our tickets and gotten sufficiently fucked in the ass by the Mexico government (they add a $20USD surcharge to the ticket price and wouldn’t let us take our telephoto lenses in,) we entered.
The first thing we noticed was the sheer number of vendors. Almost every square inch of grass on the walkways was occupied by a person selling trinkets. And as we came to realize, almost every stand was selling the exact same trinkets.
There must be a mass supplier around or something, because it felt like I was stuck in a reoccurring dream every ten seconds. And since the competition was enormous, vendors were constantly trying to seduce you into their piles of garbage.
The trick is to just completely disregard them. I used to say “no, gracias,” but after so many encounters, my “humanity” gauge has be chipped raw. I simply pretend they don’t exist.
Eventually, we arrived at the main attraction, the pyramid. It was packed with people posing for photos, and borderline impossible to find an angle without someone in the background. Couple that with the fact that it was being beat down by mid-day lighting, and I was torn.
Fuck.
I tried a few photos, but I realized I wasn’t sufficiently warmed up for the complexity of this shot. Instead, we decided to take a detour into some smaller ruins in the trees. These new ruins were significantly less crowded, and had some interesting lighting features that I could get my warm-up reps in.
Here’s the first scene I stumbled upon:
“Wheat 300AD”
Taken with Sony a7rIII + Zeiss 24-70mm f/4
[ISO 50 ~ 25mm ~ f/9 ~ 1/30s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
I immediately fell in love with that shot, forgetting we were moments away from tourist hell. A smile appeared on my face, and my confidence grew ever so slightly.
We kept walking.
The next scene I found was this massive row of pillars in the grass. Oddly enough, I recognized them from a photo my parents showed me when they visited the place in the 80s:
"Pillars of the 80s”
Taken with Sony a7rIII + Zeiss 24-70mm f/4
[ISO 50 ~ 70mm ~ f/9 ~ 1/60s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
I loved the contrast of the black/green in that shot.
About 30 minutes later, I decided it was time to try my luck at the big pyramid again. It was lingering in my mind all morning, and I knew I had to face it eventually. There HAD to be some way to nail a shot of it, I just needed to figure out the puzzle.
At first I experimented with some foreground shots with a rock, and assumed I’d just Photoshop all the people out. The only problem was I’d fucked with Photoshop long enough to know it wasn’t gonna be pretty. I took a step back to think.
No matter what I did, there was always at least 10 people in frame, often taking up large portions of it. The main problem was all these frickin’ people. So what if I could get in front of them somehow? Ruin their shots for once?
I walked up really close to the corner of the pyramid (the place with the most dimension) and looked around. I was in frame of about precisely 3 people’s Instagram shot. The only foreground was some measly grass about 6 inches high. I dropped my camera to check it out anyway, because you never truly know.
And my viewfinder decided to show me this:
"Pyramid of Tomorrow”
Taken with Sony a7rIII + Tamron 17-28mm f/2.8
[ISO 50 ~ 17mm ~ f/2.8 ~ 1/1600s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
With my camera low enough, the wide angle lens made the grass look ridiculously tall. It made a hefty foreground- exactly what I needed to get the job done. Blue and yellow are also complimentary colors, so the blue sky makes perfect sense here.
I wonder if that grass from earlier in the shoot was subconsciously in my mind still for this shot… Again, this illustrates the importance of warming up with smaller scenes to fully take in your environment!
WOO!! I currently have that shot as the wallpaper on my computer because it’s so dope. I feel like I can feel the breeze of the grass just looking into it. Today I’d conquered my stereotype of blue skies, and found joy in the depths of tourism.
I did one more scan of the park, then we hightailed out of there. The heat was starting to kick in, and I was sweating like a mule.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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