New Photo Project: “From Above”

From Above, #78, Barcelona, 2025

“Barcelona, archives of courtesy, shelter of the foreigners, hospital of the poor, father-land of the brave, vengeance of the offended and pleasant correspondence of firm friendship, and in site, and in beauty, unique.”

Motivated Anew

With photography these days, it takes a specific project idea to get me to pull out the big camera anymore. Yes, just snapping photos with my iPhone of whatever catches my eye is fun, and a few nice images can result, but I really like putting together a limited portfolio of quality photographs (that can be printed quite large), all on the same theme, processed in a similar way, and presented as what we artists might call “a body of work”.

So, it occurred to me… that I very much like photographing from the tops of mountains, ridges, and cliffs, so why not photograph from the “summits” of the various made made structures right here in Barcelona?

If you are at all familiar with the city, or have visited, you might enjoy trying to figure out from where I was doing the photographing, and you could also play the game of identifying as many of the city’s famous landmarks as you can. As dense and chaotic as the city appears from above, sometimes this is harder than you might think.

In addition to the more well-known and iconic human structures you will recognize, I am finding it even more rewarding to zoom in to other, quite unknown and even ephemeral, details, perspectives and compositions… the goal being to find a different way of seeing Barcelona that might reveal yet another facet of its personality.

I found myself using a Nikkor f/4 70-200mm telephoto lens on my Nikon D850 (handheld) for the vast majority of these images, and I processed them all similarly through Adobe Photoshop Elements, then converted them to monochrome, all in a similar way, with Nik Silver Efex Pro.