Occasionally, before I head to a new place, I get online and scope out photographs to get ideas for shooting locations. When I came across images of the reflecting cactus pool at the Ethno-Botanical Garden in Oaxaca, Mexico, I knew I had found something magical. Within hours of my arrival in Oaxaca, I had tracked down the gardens and gotten a very rare permit from the director to shoot photos over the following two evenings. The garden itself is the old grounds of the Santo Domingo de Guzman church and monastery. Built in the late 1500’s and fully restored in 1999, the church remains a functioning religious site, but the monastery has been converted into a regional museum. The museum is best known for housing sacred gold relics that have been discovered at Monte Alban, the ancient indigenous pyramids just outside of the city. Due to potential monastery access issues through the gardens, it its closed at sunset and getting to stay even a half-an-hour into the dusk is a great privilege. Unfortunately, I was asked to sign a strict personal use agreement, so I may never really get to do much with these images, but having the opportunity to take them was thrilling.
Although, I was granted access to the gardens from 5-7pm, and it was almost dark by 6:30, I had to be at the gates at 6:45 or the guard would lock me in. This gave me a lot of time to wander around taking a variety of daylight images and almost no time in the dark at the cactus reflecting pool. Thank goodness I had two nights to shoot, because I totally blew it the first evening. These images are the first that I have taken with my new Nikon 10-24 lens and obviously I still have a lot to learn about focusing it in the dark. Even though, I set up the shot before dusk, like a well-organized photographer, I accidentally moved the camera and could not quite get it back into focus. This mistake was not really apparent on the back of my camera, but later in Lightroom, I could tell the images were fairly useless.
The second night by the reflecting pool was much more successful, but making this image was far from easy. In order to get an image in the dark, I was relegated to shooting during the transition from evening to night when the light changes very fast. Thus, I was forced to run back and forth around the reflecting pool to the camera, adjusting the exposure settings for every image. This is why you can see a fairly pronounced difference between the first and second images at the pool. Both nights, 6:45 came far to fast, just as I was getting into the swing of things and the images were getting interesting. All in all, I feel like the shoot was a success and I am happy with the work, but of course I would have loved to have more time.
