Barcelona and Bilbao, Spain | 2017

In August I spent a couple weeks in Spain, mostly in Barcelona, with a few nights in Bilbao, and a day trip to Figueres.

Throughout the two week trip, I snapped about 1100 pictures with a Nikon D7200, then boiled all those down to a couple dozen keepers.

This should go without saying, but these photos do not even come close to covering the sum total of my experiences in Spain.

I ate amazing food, and drank fantastic wine, cocktails, and beer. I traversed countless streets and explored myriad interesting little nooks in incredible neighborhoods. I witnessed the aftermath of a terrorist attack, and then attended not one but two local neighborhood celebrations that are hundreds of years old and can't be stopped. I waded through a massive crowd at free concert by a contemporary Spanish pop star, who I randomly had sat across from on a short flight to Bilbao without knowing who he was (the passengers asking him for selfies was my first clue to his fame). I visited the titanium-wrapped architecture of the Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim museum. And I dug a little bit into the heavy handed influence of Antoni Gaudi’s classically odd style, on display throughout Barcelona. Mostly I just wanted to wander the narrow streets of neighborhoods like El Raval and Gracia on warm days and nights, exploring and stopping to eat and drink in vibrant and active local plaças at all hours.

Some of those experiences were captured on my Nikon and posted here, other moments were recorded through the lens of an iPhone (and posted to Instagram), and even more of it was committed to memory with no photographic record. Because sometimes I prefer to not have a screen or a lens between me and the people, places, and things around me. If I took nothing else away from this trip, it’s that the Spanish — and specifically the Catalan people of Barcelona — have quality-of-life as locked as I’ve ever experienced it. And that’s not always something I can show, or want to experience, solely through a lens.

[Warning: Nerd Stuff | Photo Gear]

I shot daily with the Nikon D7200, mostly through a Nikkor AF-S DX 10-24mm wide angle zoom lens. One day was spent with a prime Nikkor DX 35mm, and another day I spent shooting with the Nikkor AF-S DX 18-140mm kit lens, but I find that the 10-24mm usually covers my needs the best. I generally prefer to approach shooting cityscapes, architecture, and street scenes with a wide field of view, and that lens totally delivers. At it’s widest (10mm, a true 15mm due to the cropped sensor on the D7200), the lens is more than capable of capturing entire buildings and broad scenes, and its tightest (24mm, a true 36mm) it's perfect for images that required a narrower field of view — closeups, people, interiors, narrow passages — without getting too close.

I do kind of prefer prime lenses (ones with fixed focal lengths) to zoom lenses (for various reasons, not the least of which is edge image distortion at wide angles, but also sheer physical size), and I did find myself occasionally wishing that I had a small array of various prime lenses with me instead. But 1) I pretty much never like carrying around a bag full of camera gear, and 2) frankly, I’ve always felt that creativity ultimately flourishes within the confines of limits, and with specific regard to my own photography, those limits force me to see and think about subjects in different ways — especially if I only have one lens on me, and I have to move forward, backwards, up, down or sideways to get the shot I see in my mind’s eye, or to see something better. The 10-24mm lens is a nice balance between options and limits.