Peru Photo Tour - Special images of the people from the Sacred Valley

When I take people to Peru for a photo tour, one of the favorite stops is almost always when we visit a local village high up in the Sacred Valley. Before we all go to their home for lunch, we usually stop by the school (or church) to see all the children. 

On this visit, I suggested a group photo for all the children and their teachers. It was fun for them and this way I can print some photos for them and bring them back to them on the next visit.

The kids took a little while to warm up to us, but eventually got used to us and our cameras and I encouraged them to let me take their portraits.

I was shooting with the Canon R5 Mark II and the RF 100-500mm lens since I did not have my RF 70-200mm lens with me (my favorite portrait lens). They went from reluctant to hamming it up for me. 

They also went from one child to a whole bunch. They would run out to a spot, let me take their photo...

...and then run back to me to see the photos on the back of the camera.

They were so cute! Thanks to Maureen (one of my guests) for taking these photos of me having fun with the kids.

Then it was time to head up to the house for lunch. On our way up, I saw this baby on mom's back and had to get this shot.

When we got to the house, everyone had a great time taking photos of them preparing our meal.

There is nothing more authentic than this!

Half way through lunch I remembered that I had printed images from our last visit, and brought them as gifts. I went back to our van and got them for the ladies I had photographed. They really enjoyed seeing themselves in print. 

After lunch we walked to a ceremonial area, so that they could perform a blessing over the Alpaca. I saw that one of the little boys was helping Maureen to the location and captured that sweet moment.

They rounded up the Alpaca from the fields nearby and brought them into a small area.

We all watched as they performed their blessing.

Two of the ladies performed a dance. After taking a bunch of photos at a fast shutter speed, I encouraged everyone to slow their shutter speed to show the motion of the dance. This was taken at 1/8 of a second.

They offered any of us to pick up an Alpaca for a photo. Bart hoisted this one like it was nothing. :)

We even had a chance to get a group shot with all of us.

After visiting the family, we went back into the local town to visit a market. The people at this market have amazing character and I love photographing them.

Look at that face. :)

While walking around, I saw this cat peek out amongst the eggs and loved that moment. 

While we were photographing the market, I was teaching some different techniques. In this case, I was showing people how we could focus on the flowers and make them the subject, while having the merchant be the supporting subject.

I love cheese, and this all looked so good.

This last photo still makes me laugh. I was walking through one of the meat areas and saw this dog sitting by the butcher, waiting for some scraps. This reminded me of a Norman Rockwell scene. Oh...and yes...the dog was thrown some scraps soon after this photo was taken.

The next blog post will be from the Amazon rain forest of Peru. After that, I will start sharing images from the Galapagos photo tour which followed this one. Lots of photo to share with you all! 

I also added two more photo tours (Peru and Galapagos) for 2027. You can see those HERE.

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Alaska and more.

• You can purchase Jeff Cable Photography images from my new fine art site at: https://fineart.jeffcable.com/

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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Peru Photo Tour - visiting Machu Picchu once again!

Going to visit Machu Picchu is a once in a lifetime trip for most people, so it was a real treat to visit there for the second time in as many years. Just like we did the year before, we made two visits to the site, once in the afternoon and one time the following morning. This gives us two chances to get a nice clear view of the ruins, and since Machu Picchu is located in the cloud forest, it might take a couple of times to get a good view.

On this trip we were fortunate to have a good clear view on the first day. Not only did we have clear views, but we also had nice clouds in the sky to make for interesting photos.

Since this was my second photo tour to Peru in the two years, I knew the best places for my guests to shoot from, and I pushed myself to get something different from last time. For this reason, I looked for different angles and perspectives of these iconic ruins.

I even created a really large panoramic image (100MB) using 5 overlapping images from the Canon R5 Mark II camera (using the RF 24-105mm lens with a Tiffen Circular Polarizing filter).

The clouds were moving in and out which gave us some really interesting light to work with. 

I saw this pretty plant growing on one of the walls and thought that it would make an interesting subject for a photo. I focused the lens on the plant and took this at f/4 so that the ruins would be out of focus, but just clear enough for the viewer to know what was in the background.

We arrived at the ruins at 2pm and took 3 hours to photograph the area. Just before they closed the area (which happens at 5pm every evening), I saw some llamas coming towards us. While other people were trying to get selfies with these animals, I was focused on getting images of them with the ruins behind them. For a split second these two kissed and I got this shot, which is my favorite from the day.

After taking that photos, we were walking through the back portion of Machu Picchu when I saw this animal perched on a rock. At first I thought it was a rabbit, but our guide told me that this is a Peruvian Chinchilla.

The best part of closing the area at 5pm, is that everyone else was gone and it gave us clean shots with no people in the frame.

It was really quiet at this time.

The next morning, some of us woke up at 5am and headed back up to Machu Picchu to see the sunrise. Unfortunately it was raining and the visibility was really poor. BUT there was an advantage to this, as many people decided not to make the climb and this provided some nice quiet time to have the place to ourselves.

We did have a quick clearing at one point, but that was the extent of the view that day.  The great part was this...one of my guests had her birthday that morning and she had some time to stay at the top of the mountain and enjoy the unspoiled scene. She said that it was the best birthday she had ever celebrated and that made my day!

Later in the morning we took the train from Machu Picchu back to the Sacred Valley. Some of my guests were enjoying time outside, at the back of the train car. I saw this and thought that it would make for a really cool motion blur photo and a great teaching moment. I went back to my luggage and grabbed my camera. I set the ISO to 50 and the aperture to 22, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/5 sec. I took numerous photos and then showed them to my photo tour guests. They were inspired by this and most of them tried some slow shutter images for themselves. I loved that! 

Oh - and by the way - I just added new photos tours to Peru and Galapagos for 2027 on my web site. Check them out HERE.

__________________________________________________________

• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Alaska and more.

• You can purchase Jeff Cable Photography images from my new fine art site at: https://fineart.jeffcable.com/

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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Peru Photo Tour - Capturing really cool photos in the Sacred Valley

After touring Lima for a day and a half, we flew to the city of Cusco. But once landing at this high altitude city, we get on our bus and head down into the Sacred Valley. We do this for 3 reasons:

1. It gives people time to adjust to the 12,000 foot altitude

2. There are some beautiful areas to visit in the valley

3. This is on the way to Machu Picchu

Our first visit in the Sacred Valley was to a hummingbird garden where we can view these amazing birds (and species) and capture some cool photos. For these images, I was using the Canon R6 Mark II and the Canon RF 100-500mm lens. I watched these two hummingbirds sparring and started firing off photos. In a split second the bird on the left spread its tail feathers, which looks so beautiful!

I was calling out settings as we all tried to track these fast moving birds. I challenged everyone to get good motion in their wings, but while keeping their faces in perfect focus.

We watched as other birds came to visit the area.

Most of the other birds flew slower, less erratic and landed often, making them easier to capture.

But we were there mainly to capture the hummingbirds. Since we were there in the morning, the sunlight was at our backs, which really brought out the amazing color in the birds.

About 10 minutes later, the two hummingbirds were back at it. I liked the way that the one on the left had lifted it's feathers by the face.

It was fun to capture images of the hummingbirds in different positions. I caught this one flying right towards me.

The one hummingbird that we wanted to capture (even more than the others) was the Sword-billed hummingbird which is specific to this high-altitude region, This is the only bird who's beak is bigger than it's body. We were lucky enough to have numerous visits from the Sword-billed during our one hour visit.

After photographing the birds, we were off to visit the local woman artisans who create beautiful alpaca wool garments. They showed our group how they add color to the wool using only natural materials.  

This was also a perfect place to teach portraiture and how to use available light to light our subjects...

...and to capture detail images to tell the story of the process. 

Since I had been to this same location last year and figured that I would see some of the same people, I printed many of my portraits (on the Canon Pro-1000 printer) to bring them as gifts. It was fun to find this nice woman who was one of my favorite subjects of the last photo tour, and get a photo of her holding the print.

Our next stop was for lunch, and not at just any restaurant. This is also a highlight of the photo tour, because we have lunch at a location which has many llama and alpaca. 

My guests always love this spot!

I was shooting with the Canon R5 Mark II and RF 24-105mm f/4 lens and had this one llama who came right up to me. I put the lens right up to it's face, used the face and eye detection to focus on the eyes, and took this shot. Too funny.

Speaking of funny looking subjects...I even had my photo taken at the restaurant. (Photo credit: Gretchen A.)

After lunch we visited the salt mines. These mines have been in existence for more than 1000 years! Each one of these pools is owned by a different family, and has been handed down for many generations.

Since I had photographed these mines using a wide lens during the previous photo tour, I decided to use my Canon RF 100-500mm lens this time around, to get some tight shots of the people collecting salt. And of course, I had to purchase more of the flavored salt for myself and my brother (who was with me on the previous trip).

The next blog post will feature photos from Machu Picchu!

__________________________________________________________

• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Alaska and more.

• You can purchase Jeff Cable Photography images from my new fine art site at: https://fineart.jeffcable.com/

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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